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GENERAL EDITOR 
WILBUR LUCIUS CROSS 

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN YALE UNIVERSITY 



JM 



MACAULAY'S 
LIFE OF JOHNSON 

AND SELECTIONS FROM 

JOHNSON'S WRITINGS 



EDITED BY 

CHESTER N. GREENOUGH 

1 

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH 
IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY 




NEW YORK 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

1912 



Copyright, 19 12, 

BY 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 



THE QUINN A BOOEN CO. PRESS 
RAHWAY. N. J, 



gCLAS128l9 



:« ^ 



CONTENTS 

Introduction page 

I. Macaulay's Life . . . . • • . . vii 

II. Macaulay's Writings xv 

III. Macaulay on Johnson xxix 

IV. Macaulay's Temper and Style .... xxxvi 
Chronological Table of Johnson's Life and Times . . xli 

Bibliographical Note xliii 

Macaulay's Life of Johnson 3 

Selections from Johnson: 

Letter to the Earl of Chesterfield 51 

The Rambler, No. 60 53 

The Idler, No. 85 . . . 58 

The Idler, No. 103 6i 

The History of Rasselas 63 

Prayers 70 

Notes and Comment 75 

Questions and Topics for Discussion loz 

Portrait of Johnson Frontispiece 

Portrait of Macaulay xlvi 

Coffee-room in Cheshire Cheese Inn 3 



INTRODUCTION 



MACAULAY'S LIFE 

Thomas Babington Macaulay, born October 25, 
1800, was of good stock, — Scotch Presbyterian and 
Quaker blood united. By his excellent mother he was 
wisely brought through a precocious but happy childhood, 
during which, though he did not altogether neglect play, 
he loved best to read incessantly and to talk about what he 
had read. This manner of life he continued at a private 
school near Cambridge, where his studies, though limited 
in number, were of a sort to give him a genuine love for 
sound literature. He wrote to his mother: ^' We do Latin 
verses twice a week .... We are exercised also once 
a week in English composition, and once in Latin com- 
position, and letters of persons renowned in history . . .. 
We get by heart Greek grammar or Virgil every evening.'* 
English literature, meanwhile, seems to have delighted 
Macaulay not as one of his tasks, but as a recreation. At 
fifteen he prefers Boccaccio to Chaucer, and recommends 
his mother to look up Dryden's Fables. For Gil Bias 
he has '^ unbounded admiration,'' and he has read a good 
deal of Gibbon. Yet he was a natural boy, too, and in 
one of his delightful letters from school promised to bring 
home a pair of rabbits for his sisters if his ^* purse is 
sufficient." 

vii 



viii Introduction 

At eighteen he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, 
for which he always retained the most affectionate re- 
gard. At Trinity his friends, an eager, able, generous- 
minded group, were men to challenge his best abilities in 
conversation and debate. For a very high place in scholar- 
ship Macaulay was disqualified by his lack of inclination 
for the physical and mathematical studies that have long 
been honored at Cambridge. It is characteristic of him 
that he followed his own bent, neglected science and 
methodical studies generally, and read largely in the direc- 
tion of least resistance. In later years he expressed regret 
that he had not disciplined his mind by severe application 
to the despised subjects. '' I often regret, and even 
acutely,'' he wrote, '' my want of a senior wrangler's 
knowledge ^ of physics and mathematics ; and I regret 
still more some habits of mind which a senior wrangler 
is pretty certain to possess." Nor was Macaulay a friend 
to the time-honored practice of perfecting himself in Greek 
and Latin composition, skill at which was necessary to the 
candidate for honors. His Latin declamation, however, 
was good enough to win him a prize, and in 1821 he 
received a Craven scholarship, as well as prizes for essays 
and poems. In 1824 he became a Fellow of Trinity, 
a high honor which gave him, then and always, the great- 
est satisfaction. His residence at Trinity was a happy 
and influential period in his life. Though to a certain 
degree neglecting some of the specially prescribed studies 
of the place, he was there, as everywhere, a vigorous 
reader and a great talker and debater. Much of the 
peculiar excellence of his later work, as well as many of its 
faults, may doubtless be traced in part to the fact that he 

^ The senior wrangler at Cambridge is the winner of highest 
honors in mathematics. 



-j^i. 



Macaulay's Life ix 

could not satisfy himself with the routine prescribed by 
the schools/ 

Meanwhile Macaulay's father had undergone financial 
losses which now made it necessary that his son should 
choose a profession, and accordingly he turned to the law, 
though not with his whole heart. His legal studies did 
not prevent him from sending contributions to various 
magazines, one of which, — the well-known essay on Mil- 
ton, — appeared in the Edinburgh Review in 1825. This 
was an event of great importance in Macaulay's career. 
The Edinburgh Review, founded in 1802, was a quarterly 
periodical of the greatest prestige. Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, 
Horner, and others, had given it a position in both politics 
and literature which made it in every way the best place 
in which the essays of a young man with interests and 
views like Macaulay's could possibly appear. But the 
older generation of Edinburgh reviewers were just then 
beginning to need the reinforcement of younger and more 
vigorous pens. Indeed, the editor, Francis Jeffrey, had 
recently written down from Edinburgh to a correspondent 
in London : " Can you not lay your hands on some clever 
young man who would write for us? The original sup- 
porters of the work are getting old, and either too busy or 
too stupid, and here the young men are mostly Tories." 

Immediate success followed the publication of the article 
on Milton. " The more I think," wrote Jeffrey, " the 
less I can conceive where you picked up that style." Other 
articles followed — on Machiavelli, Hallam, Southey, 
Byron, Bunyan, Hampden, and a wealth of other sub- 
jects — to such effect that it became a saying among the 
booksellers that the Edinburgh sold or did not sell ac- 



^Trevelyan's biography, particularly the letters, will be found 
unusually interesting for this part of Macaulay^s life. 



X Introduction 

cording as it contained or did not contain an article by 
Macaulay. The young reviewer was even offered the 
editorship upon the retirement of Jeffrey in 1829, but he 
wisely declined. Almost every number of the Review 
between 1830 and 1834 ^^^ ^ loi^g contribution from 
him, however, written rapidly in the midst of many other 
concerns. 

For upon the appearance of the Milton article in 1825, 
Macaulay had become something of a literary lion. His 
letters make frequent mention of the people he met, — and 
very fine people they were, — of the talk on literature and 
politics, and of his hearty and simple enjoj^ment of it all. 
*' I dined yesterday at Holland House; all lords except 
myself,'' he writes^ on July 2, 1832; and this means that 
Macaulay was extraordinarily sought after. The opinion 
voiced by Crabb Robinson in 1826 seems to have been 
general: ^' I had a most interesting companion in young 
Macaulay, one of the most promising of the rising genera- 
tion I have seen for a long time. He has a good face, not 
the delicate features of a man of genius and sensibility, but 
the strong lines and well-knit limbs of a man sturdy in 
body and mind. Very eloquent and cheerful. Over- 
flowing with words, and not poor in thought. Liberal in 
opinion, but no radical. He seems a correct as well as a 
full man. He showed a minute knowledge of subjects 
not introduced by himself." ' No wonder that '' for the 
space of three seasons he dined out almost nightly." * 

Yet these dinners and parties were only an incident in 
a busy life of affairs. For Macaulay was sitting in Parlia- 
ment, where, in 1831, he had made a first speech (upon 
the Reform Bill) which caused the Speaker to send for 



^Trevelyan, I, 233. - Trevelyan, I, 120. 

^ Trevelyan, I, 166. 



Macaulay's Life xi 

him to say that he had never seen the House more stirred. 
Sir Robert Peel and others of great authority regarded 
Macaulay, almost from this first effort, as one of the lead- 
ing speakers of the House. Nor was his usefulness limited 
to his admirable oratory. As a commissioner of the Board 
of Control he made himself an authority upon Indian 
affairs, and in 1833 was made a member of the Supreme 
Council of India. This office took him to Calcutta for 
nearly four years, to his great regret; but it enabled him, 
while living as befitted his official position, to save from 
his annual salary of £10,000 an amount sufficient to place 
the finances of the family upon a fairly comfortable basis. 
In India Macaulay, besides reading prodigiously and writ- 
ing for the Edinburgh Review j did really important work 
in constructing the Indian educational system and the 
criminal code. His efforts in regard to the latter com- 
manded the admiration of trained lawyers, and are said 
to be bearing good fruit to this day. 

Returning to England in 1838, Macaulay took up all 
his previous activities, and in addition began his History, 
became between 1839 ^^d 1841 a cabinet minister, pub- 
lished his Lays of Ancient Rome in 1842, and his col- 
lected Essays in 1843, and made some telling speeches in 
Parliament.^ With power and influence still unimpaired 
he began, in 1844, to allow himself more time for his 
History. There can be no doubt that he would have done 
well to give up writing for the Edinburgh Review earlier 
in order to concentrate his efforts. His contributions to 
the Edinburgh during these years are not usually equal to 
his very best, and we know from his letters to Napier, the 



*The speech (1843) on Literary Copyright should, if pos- 
sible, be read. It is a fine combination of ready scholarship 
and fluent oratory. 



xii Introduction 

editor, that reviewing seriously interfered with the 
progress of the History. '' I ought to give my whole 
leisure to my History/' he wrote in 1843; ''and I fear 
that if I suffer myself to be diverted from that design 
as I have done, I shall . . . leave behind me the char- 
acter of a man who would have done something if he had 
concentrated his powers instead of frittering them away. 
I do assure you that, if it were not on your account, I 
should have already given up writing for the Review at 
all. There are people who can carry on twenty works at 
a time. . . . But I am of a different temper. I never 
write to please myself until my subject has for the time 
driven away every other out of my head. When I turn 
from one work to another, a great deal of time is lost 
in the mere transition." ^ 

In 1847, after an exciting election in which he was 
badly treated, Macaulay lost his seat as Member of Parlia- 
ment for Edinburgh, and so was still further enabled to 
give himself quietly and steadily to the composition of 
the History, Though doubtless smarting at his defeat, 
Macaulay perhaps never wrote anything more genuine 
than the fine verses composed on the very night of the 
election, in which he 

. . . slumbered, and in slumber saw once more 
A room in an old mansion, long unseen. 

That room, methought, was curtained from the light, 
Yet through the curtains shone the moon's cold ray 

Full on a cradle, where, in linen white, 
Sleeping life's first soft sleep, an infant lay. 

Past the sleeping boy there sweep disdainfully the queens 
of Gain, of Fashion, of Power, and of Pleasure, until 

^ Napier's Correspondence, p. 425. 



Macaulay's Life xiii 

Came one, the last, the mightiest, and the best. 

Oh! glorious lady, with the eyes of light, 
And laurels clustering round thy lofty brow. 

Who by the cradle's side didst watch the night. 
Warbling a sweet strange music, who wast thou? 

"Yes, darling; let them go," so ran the strain: 

"Yes; let them go — gain, fashion, pleasure, power, 

And all the busy elves to whose domain 
Belongs the nether sphere, the fleeting hour. 



" Of the fair brotherhood who share my grace, 
I, from thy natal day, pronounce thee free; 

And, if for some I keep a nobler place, 
I keep for none a happier than for thee. 



" I brought the wise and brave of ancient days 
To cheer the cell where Raleigh pined alone. 

I lighted Milton's darkness with the blaze 

Of the bright ranks that guard the eternal throne." 

Having seen this vision, and having felt that he could 
never ** leave public life with more dignity and grace than 
at present,'^ Macaulay really set himself at work. He 
w^rote in 1849, after the first two volumes of the History 
had appeared: *' I have now made up my mind to change 
my plan about my History, I will first set myself to 
know the whole subject; to get, by reading and traveling, 
a full acquaintance with William^s reign. ... I must 
visit Holland, Belgium, Scotland, Ireland, France. The 
Dutch archives and French archives must be ran- 
sacked. ... I must turn over hundreds, thousands, of 
pamphlets. Lambeth, the Bodleian, and the other Ox- 
ford libraries, the Devonshire Papers, the British Museum, 



xlv Introduction 

must be explored, and notes made: and then I shall go 
to work. When the materials are ready, and the History 
mapped out in my mind, I ought easily to write, on an 
average, two of my pages daily. In two years from the 
time I begin writing I shall have more than finished my 
second part. Then I reckon a year for polishing, re- 
touching, and printing. This brings me to the autumn of 
1853. I like this scheme much." 

The first two volumes of the History appeared in 1848; 
the third and fourth in 1855; the fifth, constructed by 
his sister. Lady Trevelyan, from her brother's unfinished 
notes, in 1861. Few works in all English literature have 
met with such prompt and striking success. Lord Jef- 
frey wrote that he was as proud of Macaulay as his own 
mother could possibly have been ; and a group of humble 
artisans near Manchester, who had the History read aloud 
to them, moved a vote of thanks '' to Mr. Macaulay for 
having written a history which workingmen can under- 
stand." Thirteen thousand copies were sold in four 
months. From the United States came news that»hardly 
ever had any book there had such a sale. On the Con- 
tinent four different translators were vying with each 
other to produce the first version in German, and ulti- 
mately the book was turned into at least ten different 
European languages. In 1856 his publishers paid him 
£20,000 in royalties. When joked and congratulated 
upon his fortunes, Macaulay, who kept his head finely 
through it all, said that he '' had some thoughts of going 
to the Chancellor of the Exchequer as a bidder for the 
next loan." 

All this, of course, meant comfort for the remainder 
of Macaulay 's life. He bought a pleasant villa at Ken- 
sington, enjoyed his garden, gave quiet dinners, worked 
at the last part of his History, and finished the few brief 



Macaulay's Writings xv 

but excellent biographies, of which the text of this volume 
is one, which appeared in the Encyclopedia Britannica, 
In 1857, to the satisfaction of every one, he became Baron 
Macaulay of Rothley (his birthplace). On the 28th of 
December, 1859, he died quietly in his library, with an 
open book upon his knees. He was buried, near Addisonj 
in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. 



II . 

MACAULAY'S WRITINGS 

Speeches. — Macaulay's speeches, nearly all on political 
subjects and nearly all made in Parliament, were col- 
lected and authoritatively published in 1854. Although 
little read nowadays, they belong with Macaulay 's very 
best work on account of their extraordinary vigor and 
clearness of style, their steady warmth of tone, and the 
vast stores of illustrative information so rapidly and easily 
directed to the point under discussion. 

With regard to Macaulay 's manner of speaking, a re- 
porter who must have heard him frequently tells us that 
'' his voice was full and loud; but it had not the light and 
shade, or the modulation, found in practised speakers. 
His speeches were most carefully prepared, and were re- 
peated without the loss or omission of a single word." ^ 

Concerning the influence of Macaulay 's speeches we 
have the important testimony of Gladstone "^ that '* twice 
at least in the House of Commons he arrested the suc- 
cessful progress of legislative measures, and slew them at a 

^ Quoted in Trevelyan's Life of Macaulay, II, 126. 
^ Gleanings of Past Years, II, 270. 



xvi Introduction 

moment's notice and by his single arm. The first of these 
occasions was the Copyright Bill of Serjeant Talfourd in 
1841; the second, the Bill of 1853 for excluding the 
Master of the Rolls from the House of Commons. But, 
whenever he rose to speak, it was a summons like a 
trumpet-call to fill the benches." 

Lays of Ancient Rome. — ''What! poetry from 
Macaulay? Ay, and why not? . . . If he be not the 
first of critics, . . . who is? . . . The Young Poets 
all want fire ; Macaulay is full of fire. The Young 
Poets are somewhat weakly; he is strong. The 
Young Poets are rather ignorant; his knowledge is great. 
The Young Poets mumble books ; he devours them. The 
Young Poets dally with their subject; he strikes its 
heart. The Young Poets are still their own heroes; he 
sees but the chiefs he celebrates. ... Sir Walter 
[Scott] would have rejoiced in Horatius as if he had been 
a doughty Douglas. 

Now by our sire Quirinus 

It was a goodly sight 
To see the thirty standards 

Swept down the tide of flight. 

That is the way of doing business! A cut-and-thrust 
style, without any flourish. Scott's style when his blood 
was up, and the first w^ords came like a vanguard im- 
patient for battle." ^ 

With this hearty slap on the back, *' Christopher 
North,'' ^ a rival critic writing for an unfriendly review, 

^ Blackii'ood's Magazine, quoted by Trevelyan, II, no. 

^John Wilson (''Christopher North"), 1785-1854, essayist 
and professor of moral philosophy, was one of the most genuine 
persons of his time. Look into his Nodes Ambrosiana, and the 
Memoir of him by his daughter, Mrs. Gordon. 



Macaulay's Writings xvii 

welcomed Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome (1842). 
Although these Lays are in form entirely diiEferent from 
Macaulay's other works, they deserve a word here, not 
only for their own sake, but because in their manner of 
bodying forth past events they are not unlike Macaulay's 
essays and his History, For in the LaySj as in the essays 
and the History, Macaulay's chief aim is copiousness and 
vividness of detail, his most conspicuous merits of style 
are clearness and vigor, and his worst defects are his 
partiality and his tendency to harangue. " Horatius," the 
first of the Lays, is a good example of the merits of 
Macaulay's verse, — spirited, compact, eloquent in its 
praise of soldierly and civic excellence. The suspense 
just before the crisis, the crash of the falling bridge 
(stanza 55), the struggle in the water (stanzas 61 and 62), 
and the triumphant conclusion, — all are related in Macau- 
lay's best manner. Many passages are defective in one 
way or another : Macaulay never could portray the pathetic 
quite successfully, and occasionally he is not at all Roman 
either in detail or in general tone. But on the whole 
it may be said that, although laboring against the disad- 
vantage that poetry was not for him a natural means of 
expression, Macaulay nevertheless managed by means of his 
great stores of information and by unusually slow and 
careful composition, to achieve some exceedingly effective 
reproductions of the past. 

History of England. — ^Twenty years before the ap- 
pearance of the first volume of his History of England, 
Macaulay wrote for the Edinburgh Review an essay on 
history in which he sketched his idea of a perfect historian. 
" A perfect historian," he wrote, " must possess an imagina- 
tion sufficiently powerful to make his narrative affecting 
and picturesque. Yet he must control it so absolutely as 
to content himself with the materials which he finds, and 



xviii Introduction 

to refrain from supplying deficiencies by additions of his 
own. He must be a profound and ingenious reasoner. 
Yet he must possess sufficient self-command to abstain 
from .casting his facts in the mold of his hypothesis. 
Those who can justly estimate these almost insuperable 
difficulties will not think it strange that every writer should 
have failed, either in the narrative or in the speculative 
department of history." English historians, Macaulay 
goes on to point out, have generally made the mistake of 
neglecting the art of narration. '* They think it beneath 
the dignity of men who describe the revolutions of na- 
tions, to dwell on the details which constitute the charm 
of biography. . . . The most characteristic and inter- 
esting circumstances are omitted or softened down, be- 
cause, as we are told, they are too trivial for the majesty 
of history." 

Macaulay then proceeds to draw an interesting parallel 
between historical reading and foreign travel. Many a 
distinguished foreigner, after having "seen a few public 
buildings, public men, and public ceremonies," has then de- 
parted, thinking that he has seen England. But the real 
way to know a strange country, which is also the real 
way to know the past, is, for Macaulay, a very different 
matter. " He who would understand these things rightly, 
must not confine his observations to palaces and solemn 
days. He must see ordinary men as they appear in their 
ordinary business, and in their ordinary pleasures. He 
must mingle in the crowds of the exchange and the coffee- 
house. He must obtain admittance to the convivial and 
the domestic hearth. . . . He who wishes to understand 
the condition of mankind in former ages must proceed on 
the same principle. If he attends only to public transac- 
tions, to wars, congresses, and debates, his studies will 
be- ^unprofitable as the travels of those . . . who form 

f 



Macaulay's Writings xix 

their judgment of our island from having gone in state to 
a few fine sights, and from having held formal conferences 
with a few great officers. 

**The perfect historian is he in whose work the char- 
acter and spirit of an age is exhibited in miniature. He 
relates no fact, he attributes no expression to his char- 
acters, which is not authenticated by sufficient testimony. 
But by judicious selection, rejection, and arrangement, he 
gives to truth those attractions which have been usurped 
by fiction. In his narrative a due subordination is ob- 
served; some transactions are prominent, others retire. 
But the scale on which he represents them is increased 
or diminished, not according to the persons concerned in 
them, but according to the degree in which they elucidate 
the condition of society and the nature of man. He shows 
us the court, the camp, and the senate. But he shows us 
also the nation. He considers no anecdote, no peculiarity 
of manner, no familiar saying, as too insignificant for his 
notice, which is not too insignificant to illustrate the opera- 
tion of laws, of religion, and of education, and to mark 
the progress of the human mind. Men will not merely be 
described, but will be made intimately known to us. The 
changes of manners will be indicated, not merely by a few 
general phrases, or a few extracts from statistical docu- 
ments, but by appropriate images presented in every line.'^ 

It has seemed worth while to present this ideal at some 
length, because it is the ideal not only of Macaulay's 
Historyj but also of most of his essays.^ To attain this 

^ It is to be noted that the frequently quoted passage from 
Macaulay's review of Hallam ("To make the past present," 
etc.) is misapplied when it is used, as is generally the case, to 
show that Macaulay aimed merely " to call up our ancestors 
before us with all their peculiarities of language, manners, and 
garb, to show us over their houses, to seat us at their tables, to 



XX Introduction 

ideal a historian must unite qualities which are almost 
never found together, — the talents of a philosopher and 
the talents of a painter. And Macaulay, as his essay 
on Bacon shows, was not even a respectful pupil of 
philosophy. Furthermore, Macaulay's ideal implies a 
treatment so detailed that its application to any very long 
period requires a lifetime, or even more. For example, to 
write a history of the entire seventeenth century on Macau- 
lay's scale might be roughly supposed to require a lifetime 
of about a hundred years, and the space of more than thirty 
volumes. So anything like a close approach to Macaulay's 
ideal is impossible, because it requires too long a time and 
too exceptional a temperament. 

Let us, therefore, confine ourselves for the moment to 
the question of Macaulay's ability to reproduce vividly 
and minutely the persons and events of a comparatively 
brief period. Here he has certainly surpassed all other 
English historians. This achievement, how^ever, was the 
result of unusual pains spent upon research and upon 
composition. We have already seen ' how thoroughly 
Macaulay planned to examine all available materials. Fre- 
quent entries in his diary show that he was as good as his 
word. This is the way he spent a day at Oxford: 
''October 2d, 1854. — ^ called on the Warden of All 
Souls', who was the only soul in residence. He was most 
kind ; got me the manuscript of Narcissus Luttrell's Diary 



rummage their old-fashioned wardrobes, to explain the uses of 
their ponderous furniture." Macaulay expressly terms these but 
parts of the duty of the historian, who should also endeavor 
" to extract the philosophy of history — to direct our judgment 
of events and men — to trace the connection of causes and effects, 
and to draw from the occurrences of former times general les- 
sons of moral and political wisdom." 
^ Pages xiii-xiv. 



# 



Macaulay's Writings xxi 

— seven thick volumes in cramped handwriting — put me into 
a comfortable room ; and then left me to myself. I worked 
till past five ; then walked for an hour or so, and dined at 
my inn, reading Cooper's Pathfinder,'' ^ And Macaulay 
was equally careful to visit, when he could, the scenes of 
historical events in order to study the '' lay of the land." ' 
Next came the difficult process of composition, — a first 
draft written so rapidly as to be almost illegible, and then 
continually polished and repolished until it seemed '^ to 
flow as easily as table-talk." He writes in his diary: *'To 
make the narrative flow along as it ought, every part 
naturally springing from that which precedes ... is 
not easy. Yet it may be done." And again: '^ To-morrow 
I shall begin to transcribe again, and to polish. What 
trouble these few pages will have cost me! The great 
object is that after all this trouble they may read as if 
they had been spoken of¥, and may seem to flow as easily 
as table-talk."' 

The chief fault that can be found with the History is 
that Macaulay is prejudiced. He reverses Johnson's prac- 
tice, his critics say, and takes care that the Whig dogs 
shall have the better of it. Undoubtedly cases can be 
shown where, as in his treatment of Penn, or of Marl- 
borough, or of the country chaplain, Macaulay's accounts 
cannot possibly be called fair and complete. This seems 
an almost inevitable result of one of Macaulay's deepest 



^Trevelyan, II, 193. For similar entries, see Trevelyan, II, 
193-194. 

^Trevelyan, II, 195-196. 

^Trevelyan, II, 237, 238. The extracts from the diary which 
Trevelyan prints on pages 201 and 202 show that Macaulay 
spent almost three weeks upon the thirty pages in which he 
narrates the massacre of Glencoe. The passage occurs in the 
eighteenth chapter. 



xxii Introduction 

traits, — a trait to which are owing some of the chief 
excellences of his work. For Macaulay's devotion to cer- 
tain beliefs was so whole-hearted, and his feelings about 
the past were so thoroughly a part of him, that he was 
absolutely incapable of moving about among the Whigs 
and Tories of the Stuart days without carrying back, into a 
period which few of us see clearly enough to feel violently 
about, all of the enthusiastic faith in his own side which 
made him so much better suited to be an advocate than a 
judge. 

So, instead of expecting an absolutely just balance in the 
History, instead of censuring a vivid, minute, fervent book 
for lacking qualities which can exist only where the out- 
look is dispassionate and the treatment not too detailed 
to exhibit the growth and relation of the parts, — in short, 
instead of censuring the History for failing to be what 
such a book could not possibly be, \\t should be grateful 
for the character portraits in the twentieth chapter and 
elsewhere, for the third chapter, for the masterly accounts 
of the death and funeral of Queen Mary, of the flight of 
the Princess Anne, of the siege and relief of Londonderry, 
and of the massacre of Glencoe. The excellence of these 
parts of the History we can hardly find in Ranke, or 
Gardiner, or Stanhope, or anywhere, indeed, save in the 
brilliant pages of Macaulay himself. 

Essays. — The extraordinary merits of Macaulay's es- 
says^ have raised them into a class where they are likely 

^ The titles and dates of Macaulay's principal essays are as 
follows: '^ Milton,'' 1825; " Machiavelli," 1827; "History," 
"Hallam's Constitutional History^ 1828; '' Dryden," "Mill on 
Government," "Westminster Reviewer's Defence of Mill," 
"Utilitarian Theory of Government," 1829; " Southey's Col- 
loquies," " Robert Montgomery's Poems," " Sadler's Laiv of 
Population" 1830; "Civil Disabilities of the Jews," "Byron," 
" Croker's Edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson" " Bunyan's 



Macaulay's Writings xxiii 

to suffer by comparison with work done under more favor- 
able conditions and with more ambitious aims. Originally 
they were by no means intended for a permanent place in 
literature. Upon this point it will be best to let Macaulay 
speak for himself in words addressed, on June 24, 1842, 
to the editor of the Edinburgh Review: 

" I have thought a good deal about republishing my 
articles, and have made up my mind not to do so. . . . 
On the whole, I think it best that things should remain as 
they are. The public judges, and ought to judge, in- 
dulgently of periodical works. They are not expected to 
be highly finished. Their natural life is only six weeks. 
Sometimes their writer is at a distance from the books to 
which he wants to refer. Sometimes he is forced to hurry 
through his task in order to catch the post. He may 
blunder; he may contradict himself; he may break off in 
the middle of a story; he may give an immoderate exten- 
sion to one part of his subject and dismiss an equally 
important part in a few words. All this is readily for- 
given if there be a certain spirit and vivacity in his style. 
But, as soon as he republishes, he challenges a comparison 
with all the most symmetrical and polished of human com- 
positions. ... I will not found my pretensions to the 
rank of a classic on my reviews.'' ^ 

But the enterprise of piratical American publishers 

Pilgrim's Progress/* " Hampden," " Sadler's Refutation Refuted," 
1831; "Mirabeau," "Burleigh," 1832; "War of the Succession 
in Spain," "Horace Walpole," 1833; "Lord Chatham," 1834; 
"Mackintosh's History of the Revolution" 1835; "Bacon," 1837; 
" Sir William Temple," 1838 ; " Gladstone on Church and State," 
1839; "Clive," "Ranke's History of the Popes" 1840; "Comic 
Dramatists," "Lord Holland," "Warren Hastings," 1841; 
"Frederick the Great," 1842; "Madame d'Arblay," "Addison," 

^"Lord Chatham," " Barere," 1844. 

r ^Trevelyan, H, 101-102. 



xxiv Introduction 

made it seem best to issue, in 1843, an authoritative col- 
lection of Critical and Historical Essays contributed to the 
Edinburgh Review, which contained twenty-seven essays; 
nine more were added in the Miscellaneous Writings, pub- 
lished in i860. In a brief, straightforward preface 
Macaulay, after explaining that the publication was ren- 
dered necessary by unauthorized and inaccurate American 
editions, gave notice that no attempt had '' been made 
to remodel any of the pieces which are contained in these 
volumes. Even the criticism on Milton, which was writ- 
ten when the author was fresh from college, and which 
contains scarcely a paragraph such as his matured judg- 
ment approves, still remains overloaded with gaudy and 
ungraceful ornament. The blemishes w^hich have been 
removed were, for the most part, blemishes caused by 
unavoidable haste. The author has sometimes, like other 
contributors to periodical works, been under the neces- 
sity of writing at a distance from all books and from all 
advisers; of trusting to his memory for facts, dates, and 
quotations ; and of sending manuscripts to the post without 
reading them over.'' 

The effect of the volumes thus diffidently put forth has 
been tremendous. Few people who read at all have failed 
to read several of Macaulay 's essays. To the ordinary 
reader, indeed, they are not only familiar, but they are 
so influential as to have overpowered every other treat- 
ment of their subjects. The popular idea of Chatham, of 
Hastings, and of Temple is, in consequence, almost com- 
pletely founded upon Macaulay. Yet very few except 
students can recall the contents of a single essay by 
Southey, or Jeffrey, or Brougham, or Horner, or Sj^dney 
Smith, or any of the eighteenth-century reviewers. They 
probably remember, if they remember anything from these 
men, merely that Jeffrey said of some poem by Words- 



Macaulay's Writings xxv 

worth, " This will never do." Why is it that Macaulay's 
essays show such vitality when compared with ojther works 
in their own class? ^" 

When Jeffrey and his associates founded the Edinburgh 
Review at the opening of the nineteenth century, they at 
once displaced a kind of periodical in which such essays 
as Macaulay's, even if there had been any one to write 
them, could scarcely have found a place. The eighteenth 
century reviews, at the head of which stood the Monthly 
(begun in 1749) and the Critical (1756), were managed 
by publishers, who virtually dictated the degree of favor 
or disfavor with which any given book was to be received. 
In consequence these reviews were served by hack-writers 
whose pay was miserably small and whose life in general 
was the wretched life of Grub Street. The reviews in 
the Monthly and the Critical kept closely to the book in 
hand; often they did little more than give an abstract of 
it. In the Edinburgh Review all this was different. The 
Edinburgh J to be sure, had its own politics; but it did not 
ordinarily aim to annihilate good literature merely because 
it was written by the wrong man. Not only were con- 
tributors free to say pretty much what they liked, but they 
were paid at rates that would have seemed princely to the 
hacks of the eighteenth century. Furthermore, no reader 
of the Edinburgh Review can fail to notice that the best 
articles are not merely reviews of certain books, but rather 
essays upon subjects rendered timely by those books. Few 
readers of Macaulay, for example, remember what book 
he was supposed to be reviewing when he wrote his " Mil- 
ton," his ^^ Addison," his "History," or his "Temple." 
And no wonder. For in the " Milton," Macaulay gives 
only two pages to the book under review, although his 
entire essay fills forty-nine pages. The proportion is even 
smaller in the " Addison," where only two pages out of 



xxvi Introduction 

seventy-five discuss Miss Aikin's Life of Addison, which 
is the point of departure for the essay. More striking still 
are the "History" and the '' Machiavelli." The former 
is a propos of The Romance of History by one Henry 
Neale, which is not so much as mentioned in the entire 
essay. And the " Machiavelli," purporting to be a review 
of a French edition of Machiavelli's complete works as 
translated by a certain J. V. Perier, is thus introduced: 
'' Those who have attended to the practice of our literary- 
tribunal are well aware that, by means of certain legal 
fictions similar to those of Westminster Hall, we are fre- 
quently enabled to take cognizance of cases lying beyond 
the sphere of our original jurisdiction. We need hardly 
say, therefore, that, in the present instance, M. Perier is 
merely a Richard Roe — that his name is used for the sole 
purpose of bringing Machiavelli into court — and that he 
will not be mentioned in any subsequent stage of the pro- 
ceedings." No other mention is made of Monsieur Perier, 
and this article, like many others by Macaulay, is purely 
an essay. But several, such as those on Boswell's Life of 
Johnson and on Southey's Colloquies, are partly reviews; 
and a very few, like the ill-advised examination of Mont- 
gomery's poems, are almost wholly occupied with the book 
under discussion. In general, however, Macaulay and 
the other reviewers of his time made the books which they 
were supposed to be reviewing merely points of departure 
for rather general essays. 

When Macaulay sent in his article on Milton, the 
Edinburgh was twenty-three years old and the Quarterly 
was sixteen. Yet it was quickly perceived by many besides 
the editor of the Edinburgh Review that no such work as 
Macaulay 's had been done before. Even Macaulay, al- 
though he declares that he merely developed the sort of 
thing that Southey began, admits that perhaps he has 



Macaulay's Writings xxvii 

given it a turn for the better. The improvement lies not 
in the direction of better criticism, for Macaulay has 
hardly formulated a single valuable definition of critical 
terms or thrown light upon any critical problem that was 
really in doubt. The gain is rather in brilliant historical 
portraiture. When Macaulay has the opportunity to make 
his treatment either historical or critical, he almost always 
makes it historical. And having chosen the historical, he 
concentrates his attention upon those details that can be 
put into pictures. In consequence the gain from reading 
his essays is generally the gain of having seen a great his- 
torical pageant rather than the gain of having had things 
accounted for. For example, few tasks, probably, are more 
difficult for the historian than to reproduce the actual at- 
mosphere of a great ceremonial occasion. Any one who 
knows the records can tell who was present. But the 
memories which crowded upon those by-gone actors, the 
quick little vistas down which their memories sped into the 
still remoter past, — these are not only more difficult to por- 
tray, but far more essentfal to a full reproduction of any 
great procession or inaugural. The task calls for great 
knowledge, a powerful imagination, and the mastery of a 
style at once quick and vivid. What the result can be if 
one has these unusual powers Macaulay has shown in that 
superb passage from the ^^ Warren Hastings " which be- 
gins, ^^The place [Westminster Hall] was worthy of 
such a trial." Again, what is more difficult than to char- 
acterize a person so vividly that we seem actually to see 
him and at the same time so analytically that we clearly 
perceive his dominant trait? Yet this is the kind of 
characterization that Macaulay has given us in his essay 
on Sir William Temple. 

That he was an essayist in history rather than a critic 
of literature Macaulay himself saw clearly enough. On 



xxviii Introduction 

June 26, 1838, he told Napier: ''I have written several 
things on historical, political, and moral questions, of 
which, on the fullest reconsideration, I am not ashamed, 
and by which I should be willing to be estimated; but I 
have never written a page of criticism on poetry or the fine 
arts, which I would not burn if I had the power." ' It 
seems ungracious to agree with this disarming bit of self- 
criticism. Yet one must not only agree that most of 
Macaulay's literary criticism is either self-evident or value- 
less, but that a considerable portion of his other criticism 
is either wrong or ill-advised. What he says about Bacon's 
philosophy, about Mill, and about Boswell, for example, 
is deplorably bad ; what he says about Montgomery and 
about Barere is not very well worth while. But on Hamp- 
den, on Temple, on Clive, and on the younger Pitt we 
read Macaulay not only with delight at the brilliancy of 
particular passages, but with a feeling of critical satisfac- 
tion at the tone of the whole. Here, if not elsewhere, 
Macaulay's essays need no allowance for the circumstances 
under which they were written. Taken as a whole, they 
stand in the very front rank of their class. And a few 
of them are so much superior to their class as to have 
lifted the entire collection, despite the unworthiness of 
many passages and a few entire essays, into a not wholly 
unsuccessful comparison with *' all the most symmetrical 
and polished of human compositions." 

^Trevelyan, II, 15. 



Macaulay on Johnson xxix 

III 
MACAULAY ON JOHNSON 

Review of Croker's Edition of Boswell. — 
Twenty-five years before the appearance of the essay 
which forms the text of this book, Macaulay had written 
at length upon Samuel Johnson in his well-known review 
of an edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson prepared by his 
political antagonist John Wilson Croker ( 1780-1857). It 
is instructive to compare the two pieces. 

The review of Croker's edition of Boswell appeared in 
the Edinburgh Review for September, 1831. It consists 
of three parts: the first, a severe arraignment (in fifteen 
pages) of the inaccuracy and stupidity of Croker; the sec- 
ond, a discussion of the character of Boswell, which 
occupies four pages; the third (eighteen pages and a half), 
an estimate of Johnson. 

TrTwhat" he had to say about Croker, Macaulay, though 
he did not wholly lack justification, was unquestionably 
too severe. The two men were antagonized by their 
politics, for Croker was as ardent and active on the Tory 
side as Macaulay was among the Whigs. On more than 
one occasion they had encountered each other in Parlia- 
ment, with the result that Croker had referred to Macau- 
lay's ''vague generalities handled with that brilliant 
imagination which tickles the ear and amuses the fancy 
without satisfying the reason," ^ and Macaulay 's letters, 
particularly during 1831, contain many expressions of dis- 

^ Sir Theodore Martin's article on Croker in the Dictionary 
of National Biography, 



XXX Introduction 

like for '' that impudent leering Croker/' whom he detests 
'' more than cold boiled veal." ' Such expressions, though 
doubtless not wholly serious, give little promise of an im- 
partial review. Furthermore, it is unfortunate that the 
article was written during a period of great political ex- 
citement, when the natural opposition of parties had be- 
come intensified to acute hostility. In a letter written 
while he was reviewing Croker's book, Macaulay admits 
to his sister that '^ the rage of faction at the present mo- 
ment exceeds anything that has been know^n in our day. 
Indeed I doubt whether . . . even during the desperate 
struggles between the Whigs and Tories at the close of 
Anne's reign, the fury of party was so fearfully violent." "^ 
Even had these disturbing circumstances been absent, how- 
ever, it may be doubted whether Macaulay and Croker 
could ever have appreciated each other's virtues. As it 
was, Macaulay, having completed his review, remarked 
with satisfaction that he had '' beaten Croker black and 
blue." ' 

In violence of language, as we should expect from these 
extracts, Macaulay's attack is certainly not lacking. 
Croker's work is said to be " ill-compiled, ill-arranged, 
ill-expressed, and ill-printed," his notes '^ absolutely swarm 
with misstatements," he is even accused of not having 
^^ taken the slightest pains to investigate the truth of his 
assertions." '' Gross," '' monstrous," and '^ scandalous " 
are not too strong expressions to convey the sentiments of 
the reviewer. In many instances Macaulay's corrections 
are just, though his manner of conveying them is rarely in 
the best taste. But Macaulay wholly fails to give any 
such broad view of the faults and merits of Croker's per- 



^Trevelyan, I, 218. " Trevelyan, I, 212. 

^ Trevelyan, I, 221. 



Macaulay on Johnson xxxi 

formance as that embodied in Carlyle's review of the 
same book: ^'Diligence, Fidelity, Decency are good and 
indispensable: yet, without Faculty, without Light, they 
will not do the work. Along with that Tombstone- 
information, perhaps even without much of it, we could 
have liked to gain some answer, in one way or other, to 
this wide question: What and_how was ^jiglisiuj^if e 
in Johnson's time ; wherein has ours grown to differ there- 
from? In other words: What things have we to forget, 
what to fancy and remember, before we, from such dis- 
tance, can put ourselves in Johnson's place; and so, in the 
full sense of the term, understand him, his sayings and 
his doings? This was indeed specially the problem which 
a Commentator and Editor had to solve: . . . Of all 
which very little has been attempted here." In compari- 
son with Carlyle's large and penetrating view, Macaulay's 
strictures, though they show extraordinary care in picking 
minute flaws, seem not only ill-natured but trivial. 

From Croker Macaulay turns his attention to Boswell. 
Here he had a subject requiring penetration, generosity, 
and sympathy for hero-worship. For in James Boswell 
(1740- 1 795) we have the somewhat remarkable phe- 
nomenon of a Scottish advocate of good family and com- 
fortable means who at every opportunity put aside his 
business in order to undertake a pilgrimage to Johnson's 
shabby quarters in London, who made it the study^f his 
life to chronicle minutely the conversations in which he 
and his people were so often " tossed and gored," who has 
somehow managed, poor-spirited and uncritical though he 
was, to produce the greatest biographical portrait ever 
drawn by an English pen. Yet to Macaulay's brisk and 
positive mind Boswell presents no problem whatever. 
He was, sayi^JVIacaulay, a man of the meanest and feeblest 
intellect, whose book is great precisely because he had no 



xxxii Introduction 

mind of his own. Does this explanation carry conviction ? 
If it is the correct explanation, any person of mean ability 
should be able to write a great biography. But although 
such persons have often tried, none have succeeded. Lock- 
hart's Scott, Southey's Nelson, Trevelyan's Macaulay, — 
these, with Boswell's Johnson at their head, may certainly 
be called first-rate English biographies. And with equal 
certainty it may be affirmed that no one except Macaulay 
has ever found the explanation of such greatness as they 
represent in the littleness of their authors. We shall do 
better if, w'hile we allow ourselves to appreciate tTie clever- 
ness of Macaulay's somewhat exaggerated strictures upon 
Boswell's weak points, we accept Carlyle's tribute to the 
intense genuineness of the hero-worship that w^as hidden 
away^jn that foolish creature. 

At all events Boswell has made a great book, as even 
Macaulay ungrudgingly admits. ^* Shakespeare is not 
more decidedly the first of dramatists," he declares, '^ than 
Boswell is the first of biographers." And great biographies 
are not made by worthless creatures or without great pains 
in composition. Boswell, indeed, has hardly ever been ex- 
celled in the richness and fullness of detail with which he 
bodies forth the conversation and by-play of an intensely 
human person. To all Vv^ho may feel inclined to belittle 
the extreme technical difficulty of Boswell's achievement no 
better advice can be given than that of the famous Master 
of Balliol: 

^* Let any one who believes that an ordinary man can 
write a great biography make the experiment himself. I 
would have him try to describe the most interesting 
dinner-party at which he was ever present : let him try to 
write down from memory a few of the good things which 
were said, not forgetting to make an incidental allusion 
to the good things that were eaten; let him aim at what 



Macaulay on Johnson xxxiii 

I may call the dramatic effect of the party. And then let 
him compare the result with Boswell's account of the 
famous dinner at Mr. Dilly's, the bookseller in the 
Poultry, where Johnson was first introduced to Wilkes, 

and he will begin to understand the nature of BoswelFs 

j> 1 
genms. 

Having introduced his review by disposing of Croker 
and Boswell, Macaulay turns to Johnson himself. He dwells 
at length, and with frequent exaggerations, upon the 
misery of Johnson's early career, which he thinks was be- 
gun too late for the patronage of individuals and too early 
for that of the public. He tells how, in consequence, 
Johnson for a time lived the miserable life of a Grub 
Street hack-writer, and how, after some five and twenty 
years, he secured position, respect, and money. He repre- 
sents Johnson as an uncouth monster in the midst of a 
society to whom his manners were wholly strange. He 
condemns Johnson's style for its Latinized vocabulary, its 
antitheses, its padding, and its awkward inversions. And 
then he has something — not much — to say about what a 
profounder critic would have regarded as the kernel of 
the subject; namely, Johnson's mind. Johnson's mind, as 
seen by ^Macaulay, is extremely vigorous and extremely 
limited. " The characteristic peculiarity of his intellect 
was the union of great powers with low prejudices." 
He was, in consequence, able to criticise with justice the 
scruples of the Puritans, the cant of patriotism, or those 
literary compositions which were fashioned on his own 
principles. But for precisely the same reason he was 
ludicrously unable to perceive his own excessive scruples 
in religious matters, to recognize the merits of republican- 
ism, or to criticise aright such poets as Shakespeare or 

^Benjamin Jowett, Life and Letters, II, 33, 



xxxiv Introduction 

Milton or Thomson or Gray. It is characteristic of 
Macaulay that in summing up this brilliant but over- 
drawn and superficial portrait, he observes that Johnson 
is "more intimately known to posterity than other men 
are known to their contemporaries " and then shows us 
that to his mind Johnson is " intimately known " if we 
can image to ourselves " that strange figure which is as 
familiar to us as the figures of those among whom we 
have been brought up, the gigantic body, the huge massy 
face, seamed with the scars of disease, the brown coat, the 
black worsted stockings, the grey wig with the scorched 
foretop, the dirty hands, the nails bitten and pared to the 
quick. We see the eyes and mouth moving with convul- 
sive twitches; we see the heavy form rolling; we hear it 
puffing; and then comes the 'Why, sir!' and the * What 
then, sir?' and the 'No, sir!' and the 'You don't see 
your way through the question, sir!'" Such is the con- 
clusion of this essay by a Whig reviewer writing in his 
thirty-first year upon the great Tory moralist. In what he 
says about Boswell and Croker Macaulay reveals the 
" rage of faction " and the absence of sympathy and pene- 
tration. And what he says about Johnson, though much 
better, is far from adequate: Johnson's wig and nails and 
dirty linen Macaulay saw with astonishing clearness ; what 
lay beneath that unlovely exterior he saw — if he saw it at 
all — only through a haze of prejudice. 

Life of Johnson. — The biographical essay on Johnson 
which forms the text of this book was one of five lives 
contributed by Macaulay to the eighth edition of the 
Encyclopedia Britannica,^ It is a pleasant fact to remem- 
ber, and characteristic of Macaulay's generosity, that he 

^The others were Atterbury, Bunyan, Goldsmith, and William 
Pitt the younger. Of these the first three are much shorter than 
the Johnson; the Pitt is decidedly longer. 



I Macaulay on Johnson xxxv 

I made it a condition of contributing these articles to the 
Encyclopcedia Britannica that the matter of compensation 
I should not be so much as mentioned/ Of the other articles 
I that on Pitt is perhaps the best. 

It is instructive to compare the life of Johnson with the 
I review of Croker's edition of Boswell. Half of the earlier 
j essay deals with Croker and Boswell ; in the later essay 
ij Croker is not mentioned, while Boswell comes in for only 
I a paragraph. The earlier essay was badly proportioned 
' and poorly joined: the departures from the main line of 
development are frequent and lengthy, the successive points 
i do not grow naturally out of each other, and the para- 
j graphs are, in consequence, badly fitted together. The 
! plan of the later essay is notably good and yet very simple : 
■ it is merely to follow Johnson through his life, with 
pauses for characterization when a new work by Johnson 
; appears or when a new friend becomes influential in his 
life. The main course of the narrative is never really de- 
parted from, and the transitions from paragraph to para- 
graph are models of coherence. 

But the superiority of this biography over the earlier 
review goes deeper than mere style. As Macaulay grew 
older, dropped politics, and labored at his History^ his 
tone became more moderate, his judgment steadier, his 
tendency to exaggeration less marked. Undoubtedly there 
are excesses in the later essay, but they are matters of 
occasional detail rather than large and fundamental por- 
tions of the narrative. To say that Johnson " dressed like 
a scarecrow and ate like a cormorant " is no doubt absurd. 
And the paragraphs about poor Tetty and Mrs. Thrale 
are open to criticism. But happily such passages in the 
later essay are infrequent. 

^Trevelyan, II, 376. 



xxxvi Introduction 

A more detailed comparison of the two pieces — which 
every thorough student will wish to make for himself — 
will confirm the superiority of Macaulay's later work in 
fairness, in proportion, and in smoothness and restraint 
of style. And these remarkable improvements are accom- 
plished without the loss of vigor or any other desirable 
quality. 

IV 

MACAULAY'S TEMPER AND STYLE 

It would be strange, indeed, if an author who read and 
talked more than he thought, and who exceedingly dis- 
liked being worsted in argument, should be found free 
from certain faults of style. Particularly in his earlier 
writings Macaulay is beset by the tendency to make his 
point at whatever cost. This tendency leads him into 
certain habits which the student should notice and which 
he should -endeavor to exclude from his own work. 

Most conspicuous among these habits is exaggeration. 
Macaulay dislikes to bother with the few exceptions which 
prevent a scrupulous writer from saying that a certain 
thing is universally true. He loves the superlative, he 
loves universal propositions. Accordingly we find him 
saying that '' Rymer is the worst critic that ever lived,'* 
that '' never was there a character which it was easier to 
read than that of Cicero," that '' never was there a mind 
keener or more critical than that of Middleton," that *' not 
one Londoner in a million ever misplaces his will and 
shall/' These are all universal propositions; a single ex- 
ception will invalidate them. Careful writers, therefore, 
employ such language only when they are perfectly sure of 
their ground. But Macaulay, at least in his earlier writ- 



Macaulay's Temper and Style xxxvii 

ings, employs such expressions almost constantly. Let the 
student ponder the tremendous responsibility that a writer 
assumes in making such assertions as those in the following 
passage from Macaulay's review of Nares's Memoirs of 
Lord Burghley (1832): ''On every subject which the 
professor discusses, he produces three times as many pages 
as another man; and one of his pages is as tedious as an- 
other mans three. His book is swelled to its vast dimen- 
sions by endless repetrtibns, by episodes which have noth- 
ing to do with the main action, by quotations from books 
w^hich are in every circulating library, and by reflections 
which, when they happen to be just, are so obvious that they 
must necessarily occur to the mind of every reader. He 
employs more words in expounding and defending a tru- 
ism, than any other writer would employ in supporting a 
paradox. Of the rules of historical perspective he has not 
the faintest notion.'' ^ Such forced generalizations are 
dangerously frequent on Macaulay's pages; so too are 
such expressions as '' never," '' without parallel," " ut- 
terly," " always," '' in all literature." Often, of course, 
he uses extravagant language — as when he speaks of 
Johnson ''swallowing his tea in oceans"- — in such a way 
as to show that he does not expect to be taken literally. 
But the fault is so serious, nevertheless, as to call for 
mention and for an emphatic warning to any one who may 
be disposed to imitate Macaulay in this respect. 

Akin to this habit of exaggerated and superlative state- 
ment is Macaulay's tendency to unfairness in argument. 
Often this unfairness consists in suppressing the part of 
the evidence which would disprove a sweeping, universal 
statement. For instance, Boswell cites a single instance of 
Johnson's dining, with borrowed money, upon venison and 

^ The italics are not Macaulay's. 



xxxviii Introduction 

champagne. Whereupon Macaulay assures us that when- 
ever he could afford it, Johnson dined in that way. Again, 
Boswell tells us that Johnson, while at the university, was 
generally to be seen lounging near the college gate enter- 
taining his fellows, '' if not spiriting them up to rebellion 
against the college discipline'' Under Macaulay's manipu- 
lation Johnson becomes the leader '' in every mutiny against 
the discipline of the college." ' Here Boswell's suspicion, 
which is strictly not sufficient to permit us to say that 
Johnson ever incited a single rebellion, is made the basis 
of a statement that no college rebellion occurred during 
Johnson's time in which he was not the ringleader. 

Two more instances may be cited in which Macaulay 
misuses his evidence. With regard to a certain class of 
statements Johnson said: '' Do not wholly slight them, be- 
cause they may be true; but do not easily trust them, 
because they may be false." On this basis of this perfectly 
judicial statement Macaulay represents Johnson as " warn- 
ing his readers not to slight such impressions." In other 
words, Macaulay suppresses that half of the evidence 
which contradicts what he wishes to say. Again, we find 
him, in a letter to Napier written on April i8, 1842, de- 
fending himself for certain inelegant expressions which 
had been objected to in one of his reviews. His defence 
consists in citing Addison, '' the model of pure and grace- 
ful writing," in one of whose Spectator papers Macaulay 
says he finds such a slangy phrase as " queer old put." If 
we turn to the fifth paragraph of Spectator 383 we find 
that as the Spectator and the good Knight are returning 
from their visit to Spring Garden, they pass some young 
fellows in a boat, to whom Sir Roger calls out a good- 
night. Whereupon ''one of them, instead of returning 

'Again the italics are not Macaulay's. 



Macaulay's Temper and Style xxxix 

the civility, asked us what queer old Putt we had in the 
■ boat." Addison was, of course, simply making a rude 
I character speak rudely, and Macaulay had no right to 
I! use these words as a specimen of Addison's personal taste. 
I One is glad to find that in Macaulay's later essays and in 
j the History sins of this kind are less abundant. 
It Yet, after all, such faults of style as we have been 
\ noting are almost inseparable from Macaulay's excellences. 
' Had he not been so enthusiastic as to be in constant danger 
I of exaggeration, Macaulay would have lacked the vigor 
which is perhaps his principal merit. Had he possessed 
I the kind of mind that is at its best in weighing evidence, 
j he would probably have been at his worst in describing 
persons, places, battles, and assemblages. As it is, he is at 
i his best in doing just these things. 

The chief merits of style which aid Macaulay in secur- 
ing his effects are his remarkable unity, clearness, and 
ease. 

Macaulay's singleness of effect is partly a result of 
great care in composition, and partly a result of that habit 
of mind which makes him neglect exceptions to general 
rules. Human figures, as he saw them, are almost always 
animated by a single dominant trait and books are con- 
spicuous for some single quality. So Macaulay's ideas as 
they formed in his mind could usually be unified without 
the loss of any details which he valued. And in addition he 
was a master of the technical resources which, in sentences, 
paragraphs, and chapters, make for unity of form. 

This unity is the more remarkable on account of the 
I great mass of illustrative detail by which Macaulay 
I makes his work so clear. His w^ide reading and unusual 
! memory gave him almost unheard of powers of illustra- 
; tion. In conversation and in his letters, as well as in his 
i more studied writings, he amazed his friends by his ability 



xl Introduction 

to summon from his reading such a cloud of witnesses as 
to compel admiration and overwhelm disbelief. Over and 
over again in his writings he develops a paragraph by first 
making a general statement and then illustrating it by 
means of copious examples. The second paragraph from 
the preface to the Lays of Ancient Rome is a fair instance: 
there Macaulay opens his paragraph with the statement 
that '' the early history of Rome is indeed far more 
poetical than anything else in Latin literature." Then 
follow more than a score of instances, each phrased as 
briefly as possible. That is one of Macaulay's great merits: 
his illustrations are almost always so rapidly enumerated 
that the reader is enlightened without being fatigued. 

This absence of fatigue is also due in part to Macaulay's 
unusual care in revising his work until it ran with almost 
perfect smoothness. Hardly any prose is easier to read 
aloud than Macaulay's. One finds by so reading it that 
Macaulay's ear was very sensitive to good cadences, that 
his sentences have just the right rise and fall, that he never 
neglects the aid that comes from presenting his ideas in 
pairs or sets which match each other perfectly. Most 
admirable of all, perhaps, is his skill in making one para- 
graph grow naturally out of the other by means of those 
perfectly turned transitional sentences which would of 
themselves make Macaulay's prose a model for those who 
wish to learn to write. 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 
OF JOHNSON'S LIFE AND TIMES 

1702-14. Reign of Queen Anne. 

1709. Johnson born at Lichfield (Sept. 18). 

1709-10. Steele and Addison's Tatler. 

1711-12. Steele and Addison's Spectator, 

1714-27. Reign of George I. 

1726. Swift, Gullwer's Travels. 

1727-60. Reign of George II. 

1728. Goldsmith born. 

1728. Entered Pembroke College, Oxford. Versified Pope's 

Messiah in Latin. 

1729. Burke born. 

1729-35. Unsettled. Taught school at Bosworth. Lived at 

Lichfield and Birmingham. 
1735. Married Mrs. Elizabeth (Jarvis) Porter. Taught school 

at Edial. 
I7S5- Published an abridged translation of Lobo's Voyage to 

Abyssinia. 

1737. Began to live in London. 

1738. Contributed to Cave's Gentleman's Magazine. 
1738. Published London. 

1740. Boswell born. 

1740-43. Reported Parliamentary debates for Gentleman's 

Magazine. ("Reports of the Debates of the Senate 

of Lilliput.") 

1743. Savage died. 

1744. Published Life of Richard Savage. Pope died. 

1745. Published proposals for a new edition of Shakespeare. 

Swift died. 

1747. Published Plan for a Dictionary of the English Lan- 
guage, addressed to Philip Dormer, Earl of Chesterfield. 

1749. Published The Vanity of Human Wishes, being the 
Tenth Satire of Juvenal Imitated. 
xli 



xlii Chronological Table 

1749. Published Irene. (Acted in 1748.) 

1750-52. Published the Rambler (all except five papers are 

by Johnson). 
1752. Death of Johnson's wife. 

1753-54. Published certain papers in the Adventurer. 
1755. Letter to Chesterfield. Published the Dictionary. 
1758-60. Published the Idler (all except twelve papers are by 

Johnson). 
1759. Death of Johnson's mother. Published Rasselas, Prince 

of Abyssinia. 
1760-1820. Reign of George III. 

1762. Received pension. 

1763. Met Boswell. 

1764. "The Club" founded. 

1765. Published Plays of William Shakespeare, ivith Notes. 

1766. Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield published. 
1770. Published The False Alarm. 

1774. Published The Patriot. 

1775. Published A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland, 

and Taxation no Tyranny. Received LL.D. from Ox- 
ford. 

1779-81. Published Lives of the English Poets. 

1781. Thrale died. 

1784. Mrs. Thrale married Piozzi. 

1784. Johnson died (December 13) and was buried (Decem- 
ber 20) in Westminster Abbey. 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 

The result of a careful reading of Macaulay's essay on 
Johnson should be to arouse interest in the works, per- 
sonalities, and surroundings of Johnson himself, of Bos- 
well and the other intimate friends of Johnson, and of 
Macaulay. 

Concerning Johnson it is to be hoped that many will 
wish to read far more than they can find in this little 
volume. Let such, if they have access to a large library, 
look up the splendid edition of BoswelFs Life of Johnson 
by George Birkbeck Hill (six volumes, Clarendon Press, 
Oxford, or Harper and Brothers, New York). There is a 
good cheap edition of Boswell, which almost any one can 
own, in '^Everyman's Library '^ (two volumes). John- 
son's complete works are not in print, but there is an ex- 
cellent volume of selections from his works edited by 
Professor C. G. Osgood (Henry Holt and Company). 
The same publishers issue Johnson s Chief Lives of the 
Poets, to which is added Carlyle's essay on Boswell's Life, 
There is a brief but good account of Johnson's life by Sir 
Leslie Stephen in the Dictionary of National Biography 
and a fuller biography, from the same expert hand, in the 
''English Men of Letters" series. 

Of Boswell there are biographies by Percy Fitzgerald 
(two volumes, London, 1891) and by W. K. Leask (Edin- 
burgh, 1897, in the "Famous Scots" series). A good 
short sketch is that by Sir Leslie Stephen in the Dictionary 
of National Biography, There is interesting comment 
on Boswell and Johnson in Whitwell Elwin's Some 

xliii 



xliv Bibliographical Note 

XVIII Century Men of Letters, London, 1902, II, 237 
and following ('' Boswell and Dr. Johnson ") and in Aus- 
tin Dobson's Miscellanies (''BosweU's Predecessors and 
Editors"). 

For Macaulay we are fortunate in having the admirable 
Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay by his nephew, Sir 
George Otto Trevelyan, of which there is a cheap reprint 
in one volume published by Harper and Brothers. An 
unusually just and thorough short life is J. Cotter Mori- 
son's in the ^' English Men of Letters " series. The third 
chapter (on Macaulay 's essays) is particularly useful in 
connection with the study of this book. 

To have read thus far is to have made some acquaint- 
ance with considerable portions of English literature in two 
important periods, — the period of Johnson and the period 
of Macaulay. Yet this is but the beginning of a course 
of reading which, starting from Macaulay's essay on John- 
son, might extend much further than school requirements 
necessitate or than school terms permit. 

Such a course of reading might, for instance, take the 
form of a study of Johnson's contemporaries, such as 
Fielding, Richardson, Goldsmith, Gray, Sheridan, Horace 
Walpole, Reynolds, and Gibbon. Seccombe's Age of 
Johnson, or Sir Leslie Stephen's English Literature and 
Society in the Eighteenth Century, briefly indicates the 
place which each of these men holds in the literature of the 
period. The biography of each in the Dictionary of Na- 
tional Biography includes a list of each man's writings and 
the principal sources of information concerning him. To 
begin by finding out from Boswell's Life w^hat place these 
men held in the estimation of Johnson, and then, after 
reading liberally in the authors themselves, to ask one's 
self if Johnson's opinions are well founded, — this is to 
approach eighteenth-century literature from a standpoint 



t 



Bibliographical Note xlv 

t once definite and stimulating. In such a course of read- 
ing too much attention should not be paid to secondary 
iauthorities, yet some use may be made of Courthope's 
\History of English Poetry (the fifth volume), of Nathan 
{Drake's Essays Illustrative of the Rambler, Adventurer, 
land Idler, and of Cross's or Raleigh's history of the Eng- 
ilish novel. Long before all this has been done, innumer- 
iable questions will have presented themselves. Are the 
'works of Johnson a fair sample of the literature of his 
itime? If there are tendencies of his time with which he 
is not in sympathy, what are they and what are the grounds 
!of his dislike? Why should Johnson have felt as he did 
j about Gray? About Milton? What would Johnson have 
Ithought about Sir Walter Scott? 

j Or, starting not from the subject of Macaulay's essay 
but from the author, one may desire to know more of Jef- 
frey, Sydney Smith, Horner, Brougham, and the other 
contributors to the Edinburgh Review, Gates's Selections 
from Jeffrey (^^ Athenaeum Press Series") has an ad- 
mirable critical introduction, which carries one squarely 
into the midst of this interesting field. Did all the ** Edin- 
burgh Reviewers" write like Macaulay? Do any of them 
show better judgment than he? Wider reading? Does 
their critical work reveal their political inclinations? In 
what respects ? Are Macaulay's early essays different from 
his later ones? 

Again, an author as closely bound up as Johnson was 
with the life and scenes of London can hardly be under- 
stood without some such knowledge of London in the 
eighteenth century as is furnished by Traill's Social 
England, or Ashton's Social Life in the Reign of Queen 
Anne, or Wheatley's London, Past and Present, Baede- 
ker's London and his Great Britain should be in the school 
library and maps and dictionaries should be close at hand. 




Thomas Babington Macaulay 



MACAULAY'S LIFE OF JOHNSON 




Coftee-room in Cheshire Cheese Inn 

(Johnson's favorite seat tinder his portrait) 

LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON 

I. Samuel Johnson, one of the most eminent English 
writers of the eighteenth century, was the son of Michael 
Johnson, who was, at the beginning of that century, a 
magistrate of Lichfield, and a bookseller of great note in 
the midland counties. Michael's abilities and attainments 5 
seem to have been considerable. He was so well ac- 
quainted with the contents of the volumes which he ex- 
posed to sale, that the country rectors of Staffordshire 
jand Worcestershire thought him an mracle on points of 
learning. Between him and the clergy, indeed, there was 10 
a strong religious and political sympathy. He was a 
jzealous churchman, and, though he had qualified himself 
Ifor municipal office by taking the oaths to the sovereigns 
jin possession, was to the last a Jacobite in heart. At 
his house, a house which is still pointed out to every traveler 15 

3 



/ 



4 Life of Samuel Johnson 

who visits Lichfield, Samuel was born on the i8th of 
September, 1709. In the child, the physical, intellectual, 
and moral peculiarities which afterwards distinguished the 
man were plainly discernible: great muscular strength 
5 accompanied by much awkwardness and many infirmities;^ 
great quickness of parts, with a morbid propensity to sloth 
and procrastination; a kind and generous heart, with a 
gloomy and irritable temper. He had inherited from his 
ancestors a scrofulous taint, which it was beyond the \ 

10 power of medicine to remove. His parents were weak 
enough to believe that the royal touch was a specific 
for this malady. In his third year he was taken up to 
London, inspected by the court surgeon, prayed over by the 
court chaplains, and stroked and presented with a piece of^ 

15 gold by Queen Anne. One of his earliest recollections^ 
was that of a stately lady in a diamond stomacher and a 
long black hood. Her hand was applied in vain. The 
boy's features, which were originally noble and not irregu- 
lar, were distorted by his malady. His cheeks were deeply; 

20 scarred. He lost for a time the sight of one eye ; and he 
saw but very imperfectly with the other. But the force| 
of his mind overcame every impediment. Indolent as he| 
was, he acquired knowledge with such ease and rapidity! 
that at every school to which he was sent he was soon thej 

25 best scholar. From sixteen to eighteen he resided at[! 
home, and was left to his own devices. He learned much! 
at this time, though his studies were without guidance,^ 
and without plan. He ransacked his father's shelves,,^ 
dipped into a multitude of books, read what was interest-' 

30 ing, and passed over what was dull. An ordinary lad?^ 
would have acquired little or no useful knowledge in such'- 
a way: but much that was dull to ordinary lads was in- 
teresting to Samuel. He read little Greek; for his pro-- 
ficiency in that language was not such that he could takcj 



i| Life of Samuel Johnson 5 

I 

[much pleasure in the masters of Attic poetry and eloquence. 

But he had left school a good Latinist; and he soon 

II ■ 

jacquired, in the large and miscellaneous library of which 
;ihe now had the command, an extensive knowledge of 
''Latin literature. > That Augustan delicacy of taste which 5 
lis the boast of the great public schools of England he 
never possessed. But he was early familiar with some 
ll classical writers who were quite unknown to the best 
■scholars in the sixth form at Eton.; He was peculiarly 
■ attracted by the works of the great restorers, of learning. 10 
I Once, while searching for some apples, he found a huge 
folio volume of Petrarch's works. The name excited his 
curiosity ; and he eagerly devoured hundreds of pages. In- 
deed, the diction and versification of his own Latin com- 
positions show that he had paid at least as much attention 15 
to modern copies from the antique as to the original 

models. ■ 

-■' I ^ . , ? 

2. While he was thus irregularly educating himself,; his 
family was sinking into hopeless poverty. Old Michael 
Johnson was much better qualified to pore upon books, and 20 
to talk about them, than to trade in them. His business 
declined; his debts increased; it was with difficulty that 
the daily expenses of his household were defrayed. It 
was out of his power to support his son at either univer- 
sity; but a wealthy neighbor offered assistance; and, in 25 
j reliance on promises which proved to be of very little 
j value, Samuel was entered at Pembroke College, Oxford. 
I When the young scholar presented himself to the rulers 
;j of that society, they were amazed not more by his ungainly 
I figure and eccentric manners than by the quantity of ex- 30 
j tensive and curious information which he had picked up 
i during many months of desultory but not unprofitable 
I study. On the first day of his residence he surprised his 
teachers by quoting Macrobius; and one of the most 



6 Life of Samuel Johnson 

/ learned among them declared that he had never known a 
^ freshman of equal attainments. 

3. At Oxford, Johnson resided during about thred' 
years. He was poor, even to raggedness; and his appear- 

5 ance excited a mirth and a pity which were equally in- 
tolerable to his haughty spirit. He was driven from the 
quadrangle of Christ Church by the sneering looks which' 
the members of that aristocratical society cast at the holesj'- 
in his shoes. Some charitable person placed a new pair*^ 

10 at his door ; but he spurned them away in a fury. Dis-^ 
tress made him, not servile, but reckless and ungovernable/ 
No opulent gentleman commoner, panting for one-and-!" 
twenty, could have treated the academical authorities witW 
more gross disrespect. The needy scholar was generally' 

15 to be seen under the gate of Pembroke, a gate now adorned^ 
with his effigy, haranguing a circle of lads, over whom, in 
spite of his tattered gown and dirty linen, his wit andj 
audacity gave him an undisputed ascendency. ' In everyf 
mutiny against the discipline of the college he was the' 

20 ringleader. Much was pardoned, however, to a youthi 
so highly distinguished by abilities and acquirements. He 
had early made himself known by turning Pope's Messiah 
into Latin verse. The style and rhythm, indeed, were 
not exactly Virgilian ; but the translation found many ad- 

25 mirers, and was read with pleasure by Pope himself. 

4. The time drew near at which Johnson would, in the 
ordinary course of things, have become a Bachelor of Arts ; 
but he was at the end of his resources. Those promises of 
support on which he had relied had not been kept. His 

30 family could do nothing for him. His debts to Oxford 
tradesmen were small indeed, yet larger than he could pay. 
In the autumn of 1731, he w^as under the necessity of 
quitting the university without a degree. In the follow- 
ing winter his father died. The old man left but a pit- 



Life of Samuel Johnson 7 

tance; and of that pittance almost the whole was appro- 
priated to the support of his widow. The property to 
which Samuel succeeded amounted to no more than twenty- 
pounds. 

5. His life, during the thirty years which followed, 5 
was one hard struggle with poverty. The misery of that 
struggle needed no aggravation, but was aggravated by the 
sufferings of an unsound body and an unsound mind. Be- 
fore the young man left the university, his hereditary 
malady had broken forth in a singularly cruel form. He 10 
had become an incurable hypochondriac. He said long 
after that he had been mad all his life, or at least not 
perfectly sane; and, in truth, eccentricities less strange 
than his have often been thought grounds sufficient for 
absolving felons, and for setting aside wills. His grimaces, 15 
his gestures, his mutterings, sometimes diverted and some- 
times terrified people who did not know him. At a din- 
ner table he w^ould, in a fit of absence, stoop down and 
twitch off a lady's shoe. He would amaze a drawing- 
room by suddenly ejaculating a clause of the Lord's 20 
Prayer. He would conceive an unintelligible aversion 
to a particular alley, and perform a great circuit rather 
than see the hateful place.| He would set his heart on 
touching every post in the streets through which he walked. 
If by any chance he missed a post, he would go back a 25 
hundred yards and repair the omission. Under the influ- 
ence of his disease, his senses became morbidly torpid, and 
his imagination morbidly active. At one time he would 
stand poring on the town clock w^ithout being able to tell 
the hour. At another, he would distinctly hear his mother, 30 
who was many miles off, calling him by his name. But 
this was not the worst. A deep melancholy took posses- 
sion of him, and gave a dark tinge to all his views of 
human nature and of human destiny. Such wretched- 



8 Life of Samuel Johnson 

ness as he endured has driven many men to shoot them- 
selves or drown themselves. But he was under no tempta-[ 
tion to commit suicide. He was sick of life; but he was! 
afraid of death; and he shuddered at every sight or sounds 
5 which reminded him of the inevitable hour. In religion 1 
he found but little comfort during his long and frequent 
fits of dejection ; for his religion partook of his own char- ! 
acter. The light from heaven shone on him indeed, but |^ 
not in a direct line, or with its own pure splendor. The : 

10 rays had to struggle through a disturbing medium ; they 
reached him refracted, dulled and discolored by the thick 
gloom. which had settled on his soul; and, though they 
might be sufficiently clear to guide him, were too dim to 
cheer him. \N 

IS ! 6. With such infirmities of body and mind, this cele- 
brated man was left, at two-and-twenty, to fight his way \ 
through the world. He remained during about five years f 
in the midland counties. At Lichfield, his birthplace and J 
his early home, he had inherited some friends and acquired !i 

20 others. He was kindly noticed by Henry Hervey, a gay \ 
officer of noble family, who happened to be quartered there. [ 
Gilbert Walmesley, registrar of the ecclesiastical court of \ 
the diocese, a man of distinguished parts, learning, and f 
knowledge of the world, did himself honor by patronizing \ 

25 the yoimg adventurer, whose repulsive person, unpolished ^ 
manners, and squalid garb moved many of the petty aris- 
tocracy of the neighborhood to laughter or to disgust. 
At Lichfield, however, Johnson could find no way of 
earning a livelihood. He became usher of a grammar 

30 school in Leicestershire ; he resided as a humble com- 
panion in the house of a country gentleman ; but a life of 
dependence was insupportable to his haughty spirit. He 
repaired to Birmingham, and there earned a few guineas 
by literary drudgery. In that town he printed a transla- 



Life of Samuel Johnson 9 

tion, little noticed at the time, and long forgotten, of a 
Latin book about Abyssinia.^ He then put forth proposals 
for publishing by subscription the poems of Politian, with 
notes containing a history of modern Latin verse: but 
subscriptions did not come in; and the volume never 5 
appeared. 

^ 7. While leading this vagrant and miserable life, John- 
son fell in love. The object of his passion was Mrs. 
Elizabeth Porter, a widow who had children as old as 
himself. To ordinary spectators, the lady appeared to be 10 
a short, fat, coarse woman, painted half an inch thick, 
dressed in gaudy colors, and fond of exhibiting provincial 
airs and graces which were not exactly those of the Queens- 
berrys and Lepels. To Johnson, however, whose passions 
were strong, whose eyesight w^s too weak to distinguish 15 
ceruse from natural bloom, and who had seldom or never 
been in the same room with a woman of real fashion, his 
Titty, as he called her, was the most beautiful, graceful, 
and accomplished of her sex. That his admiration was 
unfeigned cannot be doubted ; for she was as poor as 20 
himself. She accepted, with a readiness which did her 
little honor, the addresses of a suitor who might have been 
her son. The marriage, however, in spite of occasional 
wranglings, proved happier than might have been expected. 
The lover continued to be under the illusions of the wed- 25 
ding-day till the lady died in her sixty-fourth year. On 
her monument he placed an inscription extolling the 
charms of her person and of her manners ; and when, long 
after her decease, he had occasion to mention her, he ex- 
claimed, with a tenderness half ludicrous, half pathetic, 30 
"Pretty creature!'' 

8. His marriage made it necessary for him to exert him- 
self more strenuously than he had hitherto done. He took 
a house in the neighborhood of his native town, and ad- 



lo Life of Samuel Johnson 

vertised for pupils. But eighteen months passed away;' 
and only three pupils came to his academy. Indeed, his i 
appearance was so strange, and his temper so violent, that | 
his schoolroom must have resembled an ogre's den. Nor i 
5 was the tawdry painted grandmother whom he called his | 
Titty well qualified to make provision for the comfort of ] 
young gentlemen. David Garrick, who was one of the | 
pupils, used, many years later, to throw the best company 
of London into convulsions of laughter by mimicking the 

10 endearments of this extraordinary pair. 

- 9. At length Johnson, in the twenty-eighth year of his 
age, determined to seek his fortune in the capital as a 
literary adventurer. He set out with a few guineas, , 
three acts of the tragedy of Irene in manuscript, and ! 

15 two or three letters of introduction from his friend 1 
Walmesley. 

10. Never, since literature became a calling in England, i 
had it been a less gainful calling than at the time when ' 
Johnson took up his residence in London. In the preced- 

20 ing generation a writer of eminent merit was sure to be , 
munificently rewarded by the government. The least j 
that he could expect was a pension or a sinecure place ; 
and, if he showed any aptitude for politics, he might hope 
to be a member of parliament, a lord of the treasury, an | 

25 ambassador, a secretary of state. It would be easy, on the 
other hand, to name several w^riters of the nineteenth cen- 
tury of whom the least successful has received forty thou- 
sand pounds from the booksellers. But Johnson entered | 
on his vocation in the most dreary part of the dreary 

30 interval w^hich separated two ages of prosperity. Litera- 
ture had ceased to flourish under the patronage of the 
great, and had not begun to flourish under the patronage I 
of the public. One man of letters, indeed, Pope, had ac- 
quired by his pen what was then considered as a handsome 



Life of Samuel Johnson ii 

fortune, and lived on a footing of equality with nobles 
and ministers of state. But this was a solitary exception. 
Even an author whose reputation was established, and 
whose works were popular, such an author as Thomson, 
whose Seasons were in every library, such an author as 5 
Fielding, whose Pasqtiin had had a greater run than any 
drama since The Beggar s Opera, was sometimes glad to 
obtain, by pawning his best coat, the means of dining on 
tripe at a cookshop underground, where he could wipe 
his hands, after his greasy meal, on the back of a New- 10 
foundland dog. It is easy, therefore, to imagine what 
humiliations and privations must have awaited the novice 
who had still to earn a name. One of the publishers to 
whom Johnson applied for employment measured with a 
scornful eye that athletic though uncouth frame, and ex- 15 
claimed, *^ You had better get a porter's knot, and carry 
trunks.'' Nor was the advice bad; for a porter was likely 
to be as plentifully fed, and as comfortably lodged, as a 
poet. 

11. Some time appears to have elapsed before Johnson 20 
was able to form any literary connection from which he 
could expect more than bread for the day which was 
passing over him. He never forgot the generosity with 
which Hervey, who was now residing in London, re- 
lieved his wants during this time of trial. ** Harry Her- 25 
vey," said the old philosopher many years later, "was a 
vicious man; but he was very kind to me. If you call a 
dog Hervey I shall love him." At Hervey's table John- 
son sometimes enjoyed feasts Which were made more 
agreeable by contrast. But in general he dined, and 30 
thought that he dined well, on sixpennyworth of meat, 
and a pennyworth of bread, at an alehouse near Drury 
Lane. • 

12. The effect of the privations and sufferings which 



12 Life of Samuel Johnson 

he endured at this time was discernible to the last in his 
temper and his deportment. His manners had never been 
courtly. They now became almost savage. Being fre- 
quently under the necessity of wearing shabby coats and 
5 dirty shirts, he became a confirmed sloven. Being often 
very hungry when he sat down to his meals, he contracted 
a habit of eating with ravenous greediness. Even to the 
end of his life, and even at the tables of the great, the 
sight of food affected him as it affects wild beasts and 
10 birds of prey. His taste in cookery, formed in subter- 
ranean ordinaries and alamode beefshops, was far from 
delicate. Whenever he was so fortunate as to have near 
him a hare that had been kept too long, or a meat pie made 
with rancid butter, he gorged himself with such violence 
15 that his veins swelled, and the moisture broke out on his 
forehead. The affronts which his poverty emboldened 
stupid and low-minded men to offer to him would have 
broken a mean spirit into sycophancy, but made him rude 
even to ferocity. Unhappily the insolence which, while 
20 It was defensive, was pardonable, and in some sense re- 
spectable, accompanied him into societies where he was 
treated with courtesy and kindness. He was repeatedly 
provoked into striking those who had taken liberties with 
him. All the sufferers, however, were wise enough to 
25 abstain from talking about their beatings, except Osborne, 
the most rapacious and brutal of booksellers, who pro- 
claimed everywhere that he had been knocked down by the 
huge fellow whom he had hired to puff the Harleian 
Library. 

30 13. About a year after Johnson had begun to reside in 
London, he was fortunate enough to obtain regular em- 
ployment from Cave, an enterprising and intelligent 
bookseller, who was proprietor and editor of the Gentle- 
man's Magazine. That journal, just entering on the ninth 



Life of Samuel Johnson 13 

year of its long existence, was the only periodical work in 
the kingdom which then had what would now be called a 
large circulation. It was, indeed, the chief source of 
parliamentary intelligence. It was not then safe, even 
during a recess, to publish an account of the proceedings 5 
of either House without some disguise. Cave, however, 
ventured to entertain his readers with what he called 
" Reports of the Debates of the Senate of Lilliput,'' 
France was Blefuscu; London was Mildendo: pounds 
were sprugs: the Duke of Newcastle was the Nardac 10 
Secretary of State: Lord Hardwicke was the Hurgo 
Hickrad; and William Pulteney was Wingul Pulnub. 
To write the speeches was, during several years, the busi- 
ness of Johnson. He was generally furnished with notes, 
meager indeed, and inaccurate, of what had been said; 15 
but sometimes he had to find arguments and eloquence 
both for the ministry and for the opposition. He was 
himself a Tory, not from rational conviction — for his 
serious opinion was that one form of government was 
just as good or as bad as another — but from mere passion, 20 
such as inflamed the Capulets against the Montagues, 
or the Blues of the Roman circus against the Greens. In 
his infancy he had heard so much talk about the villanies 
of the Whigs, and the dangers of the Church, that he had 
become a furious partisan when he could scarcely speak. 25 
Before he was three he had insisted on being taken to 
hear Sacheverell preach at Lichfield Cathedral, and had 
listened to the sermon with as much respect, and probably 
with as much intelligence, as any Staffordshire squire in 
the congregation. The work which had been begun in the 30 
nursery had been completed by the university. Oxford, 
when Johnson resided there, was the most Jacobitical 
place in England; and Pembroke was one of the most 
Jacobitical colleges in Oxford. The prejudices which he 



14 Life of Samuel Johnson 

brought up to London were scarcely less absurd than those 
of his own Tom Tempest. Charles II and James II were 
two of the best kings that ever reigned. Laud, a poor 
creature who never did, said, or wrote anything indicating 
5 rfiore than the ordinary capacity of an old woman, was a 
prodigy of parts and learning over whose tomb Art and f 
Genius still continued to weep. Hampden deserved no 
more honorable name than that of '' the zealot of rebel- 
lion." Even the ship money, condemned not less decidedly 

ID by Falkland and Clarendon than by the bitterest Round- 
heads, Johnson would not pronounce to have been an 
unconstitutional impost. Under a government, the mild- 
est that had ever been known in the world — under a 
government which allowed to the people an unprecedented 

15 liberty of speech and action — he fancied that he was a 
slave ; he assailed the ministry with obloquy which refuted 
itself, and regretted the lost freedom and happiness of those 
golden days in which a writer who had taken but one-tenth 
part of the license allowed to him would have been pil- 

20 loried, mangled with the shears, whipped at the cart's 
tail, and flung into a noisome dungeon to die. He hated 
dissenters and stock-jobbers, the excise and the army, 
septennial parliaments, and continental connections. He 
long had an aversion to the Scotch, an aversion of which 

25 he could not remember the commencement, but which, he 
owned, had probably originated in his abhorrence of the 
conduct of the nation during the Great Rebellion. It is 
easy to guess in what manner debates on great party ques- 
tions were likely to be reported by a man whose judgment 

30 was so much disordered by party spirit. A show of fairness 
was indeed necessary to the prosperity of the Magazine. 
But Johnson long afterwards owned that, though he had 
saved appearances, he had taken care that the Whig dogs 
should not have the best of it; and, in fact, every passage 



Life of Samuel Johnson 15 

jwhich has lived, every passage which bears the marks of 
'his higher faculties, is put into the mouth of some member 
jof the opposition. 

14. A few weeks after Johnson had entered on these 

I obscure labors, he published a work which at once placed 5 
fhim high among the writers of his age. It is probable 
I that what he had suffered during his first year in London 
fhad often reminded him of some parts of that noble poem 
tin which Juvenal had described the misen* and degrada- 
jtion of a needy man of letters, lodged among the pigeons' 10 
nests in the tottering garrets which overhung the streets 
! of Rome. Pope's admirable imitations of Horace's Satires 
[and Epistles had recently appeared, were in every hand, 
j and were by many readers thought superior to the origi- 
[nals. What Pope had done for Horace. Johnson aspired 15 
-to do for Juvenal. The enterprise was bold, and yet 
judicious. For between Johnson and Juvenal there was 
1 much in common, much more certainly than between Pope 
and Horace. 

15. Johnson's London appeared without his name in 20 
May 1738. He received only ten guineas for this stately 
and vigorous poem: but the sale was rapid, and the suc- 
cess complete. A second edition was required within a 
week. Those small critics who are always desirous to 
lower established reputations ran about proclaiming that 25 
the anonymous satirist was superior to Pope in Pope's 
own peculiar department of literature. It ought to be 
remembered, to the honor of Pope, that he joined heartily 

in the applause with which the appearance of a rival 
genius was welcomed. He made inquiries about the 30 
author of London. Such a man, he said, could not long 
be concealed. The name was soon discovered ; and 
Pope, with great kindness, exerted himself to obtain an 
academical degree and the mastership of a grammar school 



1 6 Life of Samuel Johnson j 

for the poor young poet. The attempt failed, and John-! 
son remained a bookseller's hack. [' 

1 6. It does not appear that these two men, the mostf 
eminent writer of the generation which was going out, andf 
5 the most eminent writer of the generation which was' 
coming in, ever saw each other. They lived in very dif- 
ferent circles, one surrounded by dukes and earls, the other 
by starving pamphleteers and indexmakers. Among John- 
son's associates at this time may be mentioned Boyse, who, 

10 when his shirts were pledged, scrawled Latin verses sit- 
sting up in bed with his arms through two holes in his 
blanket, who composed very respectable sacred poetry 
when he was sober, and who was at last run over by a' 
hackney coach when he was drunk; Hoole, surnamed thej^ 

15 metaphysical tailor, who, instead of attending to his | 
measures, used to trace geometrical diagrams on the board r 
where he sate cross-legged ; and the penitent impostor, 1 
George Psalmanazar, who, after poring all day, in a hum- f 
ble lodging, on the folios of Jewish rabbis and Christian 

20 fathers, indulged himself at night with literary and theo- f 
logical conversation at an alehouse in the city. But the 
most remarkable of the persons with whom at this time 
Johnson consorted was Richard Savage, an earl's son, a 
shoemaker's apprentice, who had seen life in all its forms, 

25 who had feasted among blue ribands in Saint James's 
Square, and had lain with fifty pounds' w^eight of iron on 
his legs in the condemned ward of Newgate. This man 
had, after many vicissitudes of fortune, sunk at last into 
abject and hopeless poverty. His pen had failed him. His 

30 patrons had been taken away by death, or estranged by 
the riotous profusion with which he squandered their 
bounty, and the ungrateful insolence with which he re- 
jected their advice. He now h'ved by begging. He dined 
on venison and champagne whenever he had been so fortu- 



ij Life of Samuel Johnson 17 

jiate as to borrow a guinea. If his questing had been 
jinsuccessful, he appeased the rage of hunger with some 
scraps of broken meat, and lay down to rest under the 
Piazza of Covent Garden in warm weather, and, in cold 
.jveather, as near as he could get to the furnace of a glass 5 
jiouse. Yet, in his misery, he was still an agreeable com- 
panion. He had an inexhaustible store of anecdotes about 
jfhe gay and brilliant world from which he was now an 
butcast. He had observed the great men of both parties 
|n hours of careless relaxation, had seen the leaders of 10 
opposition without the mask of patriotism, and had heard 
:he prime minister roar with laughter and tell stories not 
)ver decent. During some months Savage lived in the 
:losest familiarity with Johnson; and then the friends 
)arted, not without tears. Johnson remained in London 15 
:o drudge for Cave. Savage went to the West of England, 
jived there as he had lived everywhere, and, in 1743, died, 
)enniless and heart-broken, in Bristol jail. 

17. Soon after his death, while the public curiosity was 
trongly excited about his extraordinary character, and 20 
lis not less extraordinary adventures, a life of him ap- 
)eared widely different from the catchpenny lives of emi- 
lent men which were then a staple article of manufac- 
ure in Grub Street. The style was indeed deficient in 
ase and variety; and the writer was evidently too partial 25 

the Latin element of our language. But the little work, 
vith all its faults, was a masterpiece. No finer specimen 
)f literary biography existed in any language, -living or 
lead ; and a discerning critic might have confidently pre- 
licted that the author was destined to be the founder of 30 

1 new school of English eloquence. 

18. The Life of Savage was anonymous; but it was 
lA^ell known in literary circles that Johnson was the 
ivriter. During the three years which followed, he pro- 



1 8 Life of Samuel Johnson 

duced no important work; but he was not, and indeec 
could not be, idle. The fame of his abilities and learning 
continued to grow. Warburton pronounced him a man o ) 
parts and genius; and the praise of Warburton was ther 
5 no light thing. Such was Johnson's reputation that, ir 
1747, several eminent booksellers combined to emploj! 
him in the arduous work of preparing a Dictionary of tht 
English Lariguage, in two folio volumes. The sum whicl 
they agreed to pay him was only fifteen hundred guineas | 
10 and out of this sum he had to pay several poor men o:- 
letters who assisted him in the humbler parts of his task, 

19. The prospectus of the Dictionary he addressed tc 
the Earl of Chesterfield. Chesterfield had long beer 
celebrated for the politeness of his manners, the brilliancj? 

15 of his wit, and the delicacy of his taste. He was ac^ 
knowledged' to be the finest speaker in the House of Lords!^ 
He had recently governed Ireland, at a momentous con-i 
juncture, with eminent firmness, wisdom, and humanity f 
and he had since become Secretary of State. He received^ 

20 Johnson's homage with the most winning affability, and 
requited it with a few guineas, bestowed doubtless in al 
very graceful manner, but was by no means desirous t& 
see all his carpets blackened with the London mud, andt 
his soups, and wines thrown to right and left over thej^ 

25 gowns of fine ladies and the waistcoats of fine gentlemen,'^ 
by an absent, awkward scholar, who gave strange starts 
and uttered strange growls, who dressed like a scarecrow, 
and ate like a cormorant. During some time Johnson: 
continued to call on his patron, but after being repeatedly'^ 

30 told by the porter that his lordship was not at home, 
took the hint, and ceased to present himself at the inhos-;' 
pitable door. | 

20. Johnson had flattered himself that he should have 
completed his Dictionary by the end of 1750; but iti 



Life of Samuel Johnson 19 

was not till 1J35 that he at length gave his huge volumes 
y to the world. During the seven years which he passed in 
^ the drudgery of penning definitions and marking quota- 
} tions for transcription, he sought for relaxation in literary 

labor of a more agreeable kind. In 1749 he published The 5 
I Vanity of Human JVishes, an excellent imitation of the 
►, Tenth Satire of Juvenal. It is in truth not easy to say 
\ whether the palm belongs to the ancient or to the modern 
poet. The couplets in which the fall of Wolsey is de- 
scribed, though lofty and sonorous, are feeble when com- 10 
pared with the wonderful lines which bring before us all 
: Rome in tumult on the day of the fall of Sejanus, the 
- laurels on the doorposts, the white bull stalking towards 
the Capitol, the statues rolling down from their pedestals, 
the flatterers of the disgraced minister running to see him 15 
. dragged with a hook through the streets, and to have a 
kick at his carcass before it is hurled into the Tiber. It 
must be owned too that in the concluding passage the 
Christian moralist has not made the most of his advan- 
tages, and has fallen decidedly short of the sublimity of 20 
his pagan model. On the other hand, Juvenal's Hannibal 
c must yield to Johnson's Charles; and Johnson's vigorous 
V and pathetic enumeration of the miseries of a literary life 
^ must be allowed to be superior to Juvenal's lamentation 
over the fate of Demosthenes and Cicero. 25 

21. For the copyright of The Inanity of Human JVishes 
,, Johnson received only fifteen guineas. 
iT "^22. A few days after the publication of this poem, his 
• tragedy, begun many years before, was brought on the 
stage. His pupil, David Garrick, had, in 1741, made his 30 
appearance on a humble stage in Goodman's Fields, had at 
once risen to the first place among actors, and was now, 
after several years of almost uninterrupted success, man- 
ager of Drury Lane Theater. The relation between him_ 



20 Life of Samuel Johnson 

and his old preceptor was of a very singular kind. They 
repelled each other strongly, and yet attracted each other 
strongly. Nature had made them of very different clay; 
and circumstances had fully brought out the natural pecu- 
5 liarities of both. Sudden prosperity had turned Garrick's 
head. Continued adversity had soured Johnson's temper. 
Johnson saw with more envy than became so great a man 
the villa, the plate, the china, the Brussels carpet, which 
the little mimic had got by repeating, with grimaces and 

10 gesticulations, what wiser men had written ; and the ex- 
quisitely sensitive vanity of Garrick was galled by the 
thought that, while all the rest of the world w^as applaud- 
ing him, he could obtain from one morose cynic, whose 
opinion it was impossible to despise, scarcely any compli- 

15 ment not acidulated with scorn. Yet the two Lichfield i 
men had so many early recollections in common, and ' 
sympathized with each other on so many points on which 1 
they S3^mpathized w^ith nobody else in the vast population | 
of the capital, that, though the master was often provoked i 

20 by the monkey-like impertinence of the pupil, and the | 
pupil by the bearish rudeness of the master, they re- I 
mained friends till they were parted by death. Garrick now | 
brought Irene out, with alterations sufficient to displease | 
the author, yet not sufficient to make the piece pleasing \ 

25 to the audience. The public, however, listened with little j 
emotion, but with much civility, to five acts of monotonous 1 
declamation. After nine representations the play was with- 
drawn. It is, indeed, altogether unsuited to the stage, ^ 
and, even when perused in the closet, will be found hardly [ 

30 worthy of the author. He had not the slightest notion of \ 
what blank verse should be. A change in the last syllable 
of every other line would make the versification of The |j 
Vanity of Human Wishes closely resemble the versifica- -jj 
tion of Irene, The poet, however, cleared, by his benefit ^ 



' Life of Samuel Johnson 21 

I nights, and by the sale of the copyright of his tragedy, 
about three hundred pounds, then a great sum in his 
i estimation. 

j 23. About a year after the representation of Irene, he 
I began to publish a series of short essays on morals, man- 5 
j ners, and literature. This species of composition had 
I been brought into fashion by the success of the Tatler, 
\ and by the still more brilliant success of the Spectator. 
I A crowd of small writers had vainly attempted to rival 
. Addison. The Lay Monastery, the Censor, the Free- 10 
Thinker, the Plain Dealer, the Champion, and other works 
of the same kind, had had their short day. None of them 
had obtained a permanent place in our literature; and 
they are now to be found only in the libraries of the curi- 
ous. At length Johnson undertook the adventure in 15 
which so many aspirants had failed. In the thirty-sixth 
year after the appearance of the last number of the Spec- 
tator appeared the first number of the Rambler, From 
March 1750 to March 1752, this paper continued to come 
out every Tuesday and Saturday. 20 

24. From the first the Rambler was enthusiastically ad- 
mired by a few eminent men. Richardson, when only 
five numbers had appeared, pronounced it equal, if not 
superior, to the Spectator, Young and Hartley expressed 
their approbation not less warmly. Bubb Dodington, 25 
I among whose many faults indifference to the claims of 
I genius and learning cannot be reckoned, solicited the 
j acquaintance of the writer. In consequence probably of 
the good offices of Dodington, who was then the con- 
! fidential adviser of Prince Frederic, two of his Royal 30 
! Highnesses gentlemen carried a gracious message to the 
; printing office, and ordered seven copies for Leicester 
House. But these overtures seem to have been very coldly 
received. Johnson had had enough of the patronage of 



2 2 Life of Samuel Johnson 

the great to last him all his life, and was not disposed to 
haunt any other door as he had haunted the door of 
Chesterfield. 

25. By the public the Rambler was at first very coldly 
5 received. Though the price of a number was only two- 
pence, the sale did not amount to five hundred. The 
profits were therefore very small. But as soon as the fly- 
ing leaves were collected and reprinted they became popu- 
lar. The author lived to see thirteen thousand copies 

10 spread over England alone. Separate editions were pub- 
lished for the Scotch and Irish markets. A large party 
pronounced the style perfect, so absolutely perfect that in 
some essays it would be impossible for the writer himself 
to alter a single word for the better. Another party, not 

15 less numerous, vehemently accused him of having cor- 
rupted the purity of the English tongue. The best critics 
admitted that his diction was too monotonous, too obvi- 
ously artificial, and now and then turgid even to ab- 
surdity. But they did justice to the acuteness of his 

20 observations on morals and manners, to the constant 1 

. I'. 

precision and frequent brilliancy of his language, to the [ 

weighty and magnificent eloquence of many serious pas- [ 

sages, and to the solemn yet pleasing humor of some of the I 

lighter papers. On the question of precedence between ! 

25 Addison and Johnson, a question which, seventy years ago, f 
was much disputed, posterity has pronounced a decision 
from which there is no appeal. Sir Roger, his chaplain 
and his butler. Will Wimble and Will Honeycomb, the 
Vision of Mirza, the Journal of the Retired Citizen, the 

30 Everlasting Club, the Dunmow Flitch, the Loves of Hil- 
pah and Shalum, the Visit to the Ex-^hange, and the Visit 
to the Abbey, are known to everybody. But many men 
and women, even of highly cultivated minds, are unac- 
quainted with Squire Bluster and Mrs. Busy, Quist.uilius 



1* 

r Life of Samuel Johnson 23 

pd Venustulus, the Allegory of Wit and Learning, the 
Zlhronicle of the Revolutions of a Garret, and the sad fate 
if Aningait and Ajut. 

26. The last Rambler was written in a sad and gloomy 
liour. i\Irs. Johnson had been given over by the physi- 5 
Irians. Three days later she died. She left her husband 
^Imost broken-hearted. Many people had been surprised 
fo see a man of his genius and learning stooping to every 
ilrudgery, and denying himself almost every comfort, for 
':he purpose of supplying a silly, affected old woman with 10 
superfluities, which she accepted with but little gratitude, 
but all his affection had been concentrated on her. He 
fiad neither brother nor sister, neither son nor daughter. 
jfTo him she was beautiful as the Gunnings, and witty as 
Lady Mary. Her opinion of his writings was more im- 15 
portant to him than the voice of the pit of Drury Lane 
Theater or the judgment of the Monthly Review. The 
ichief support which' had sustained him through the most 
iarduous labor of his life was the hope that she w^ould 
jenjoy the fame and the profit which he anticipated from his 20 
\Dictionary, She was gone; and in that vast labyrinth of 
Istreecs, peopled by eight hundred thousand human beings, 
|he was alone. Yet it was necessary for him to set himself, 
I as \t expressed it, doggedly to work. After three more 
jlab/jrious years, the Dictionary was at length complete. 25 
i 717. It had been generally supposed that this great work 
|wc6uld be dedicated to the eloquent and accomplished 
!n([)bleman to whom the prospectus had been addressed, 
e well knew the value of such a compliment ; and there- 
re, when the day of publication drew near, he exerted 30 
hijmself to soothe, by a show of zealous and at the same time 
delicate and judicious kindness, the pride which he had 
cruelly wounded. Since the Ramblers had ceased to ap- 
peVar, the town had been entertained by a journal called 



24 Life of Samuel Johnson 

the World, to which many men of high rank and fashion 
contributed. In two successive numbers of the IVorldi 
the Dictionary was, to use the modern phrase, puffed with 
wonderful skill. The writings of Johnson were warmly 
5 praised. It was proposed that he should be invested with 
the authority of a Dictator, nay, of a Pope, over our I 
language, and that his decisions about the meaning and the I 
spelling of words should be received as final. His two^ 
folios, it was said, would of course be bought by every- J 

10 body who could afford to buy them. It was soon known") 
that these papers were written by Chesterfield. But the, 
just resentment of Johnson w^as not to be so appeased J 
In a letter written with singular energy and dignity ofi 
thought and language, he repelled the tardy advances of hisj 

15 patron. The Dictionary came forth without a dedica-|i 
tion. In the preface the author truly declared that he 
owed nothing to the great, and described the difficulties 
with which he had been left to struggle so forcibly and I' 
pathetically that the ablest and most malevolent of allf 

20 the enemies of his fame. Home Tooke, never could read 
that passage without tears. 

28. The public, on this occasion, did Johnson full I 
justice, and something more than justice. The best ^ 
lexicographer may well be content if his productions are f 

25 received by the world with cold esteem. But Johnsdi's !) 
Dictionary was hailed with an enthusiasm such as no sini- \, 
lar work has ever excited. It was indeed the first dc- 
tionary which could be read with pleasure. The definitions p 
show so much acuteness of thought and command of lai- ^ 

30 guage, and the passages quoted from poets, divines, aid '-" 
philosophers are so skilfully selected, that a leisure hoir !: 
may always be very agreeably spent in turning over tie 1^ 
pages. The faults of the book resolve themselves, for tie -f 
most part, into one great fault. Johnson was a wretchd 



i r 

Life of Samuel Johnson 25 

li etymologist. He knew little or nothing of any Teutonic 
t language except English, which indeed, as he wrote it, was 
|i scarcely a Teutonic language; and thus he was absolutely 
1^; at the mercy of Junius and Skinner. 

I 29. The Dictionary^ though it raised Johnson's fame, 5 
•! added nothing to his pecuniary means. The fifteen hun- 
;1 dred guineas which the booksellers had agreed to pay him 
I had been advanced and spent before the last sheets issued 
' from the press. It is painful to relate that, twice in the 
course of the year which followed the publication of this 10 
great work, he was arrested and carried to spunging- 
houses, and that he was twice indebted for his liberty to 
his excellent friend Richardson. It was still necessary 
for the man who had been formally saluted by the high- 
est authority as Dictator of the English language to supply 15 
his wants by constant toil. He abridged his Dictionary. 
He proposed to bring out an edition of Shakespeare by 
subscription; and many subscribers sent in their names 
and laid down their money; but he soon found the task so 
little to his taste that he turned to more attractive em- 20 
ployments. He contributed many papers to a new monthly 
journal, which was called the Literary Magazine, Few 
of these papers have much interest; but among them was 
the very best thing that he ever wrote, a masterpiece both 
of reasoning and of satirical pleasantry, the review of 25 
Jenyns's Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil. 

30. In the spring of 1758 Johnson put forth the first 
of a series of essays, entitled The Idler. During two years 
these essays continued to appear weekly. They were 
eagerly read, widely circulated, and, indeed, impudently 30 
pirated, while they were still in the original form, and 
had a large sale when collected into volumes. The Idler 
may be described as a second part of The Rambler^ some- 
what livelier and somewhat weaker than the first part. 



26 Life of Samuel Johnson 

31. While Johnson was busied with his Idlers, his 
mother, who had accomplished her ninetieth year, died at 
Lichfield. It was long since he had seen her; but he had 
not failed to contribute largely, out of his small means, to 

5 her comfort. In order to defray the charges of her funeral, 
and to pay some debts which she had left, he wrote a little 
book in a single week, and sent off the sheets to the press 
without reading them over. A hundred pounds were paid 
him for the copyright ; and the purchasers had great cause 

10 to be pleased with their bargain ; for the book was Rasselas, 

32. The success of Rasselas was great, though such 
ladies as Miss Lydia Languish must have been grievously; 1 
disappointed when they found that the new volume from | 
the circulating library was little more than a dissertation | 

15 on the author's favorite theme, the Vanity of Human 1 
Wishes; that the Prince of Abyssinia was without a mis- 
tress, and the Princess without a lover ; and that the story j 
set the hero and the heroine down exactly where it had 1 
taken them up. The style was the subject of much eager \ 

20 controversy. The Monthly Review and the Critical Re- i 
view took different sides. Many readers pronounced the ) 
writer a pompous pedant, who would never use a word of j 
two syllables where it was possible to use a word of six, i 
and who could not make a waiting woman relate her ad- 

25 ventures without balancing every noun w^ith another noun, 
and every epithet with another epithet. Another party, 
not less zealous, cited with delight numerous passages in j 
which weighty meaning was expressed with accuracy and 
illustrated with splendor. And both the censure and the || 

30 praise were merited. i 

33. About the plan of Rasselas little was said by the !i 
critics; and yet the faults of the plan might seem to in- •; 
vite severe criticism. Johnson has frequently blamed 
Shakespeare for neglecting the proprieties of time and t, 



Life of Samuel Johnson 27 

place, and for ascribing to one age or nation the manners 
nd opinions of another. Yet Shakespeare has not sinned 
n this way more grievously than Johnson. Rasselas and 
Jmlac, Nekayah and Pekuah, are evidently meant to be 
, ^byssinians of the eighteenth century: for the Europe 5 
[Which Imlac describes is the Europe of the eighteenth cen- 
jjtury; and the inmates of the Happy Valley talk familiarly 
ijof that law of gravitation which Newton discovered, and 
^'hich was not fully received even at Cambridge till the 
^eighteenth century. \Miat a real company of Abyssinians 10 
would have been may be learned from Bruce's Travels. 
IBut Johnson, not content with turning filthy savages, 
ignorant of their letters, and gorged with raw steaks cut 
from living cows, into philosophers as eloquent and en- 
lightened as himself or his friend Burke, and into ladies as 15 
highly accomplished as Mrs. Lennox or ilrs. Sheridan, 
transferred the whole domestic system of England to 
|Eg\'pt. Into a land of harems, a land of polygamy, a 
jland where women are married without ever being seen, 
jhe introduced the flirtations and jealousies of our ball- 20 
I rooms. In a land where there is boundless liberty of 
divorce, wedlock is described as the indissoluble compact. 
'*A youth and maiden meeting by chance, or brought to- 
gether by artifice, exchange glances, reciprocate civilities, 
I go home, and dream of each other. Such,'^ says Rasselas, 25 
i*'is the common process of marriage." Such it may have 
I been, and may still be, in London, but assuredly not at 
I Cairo. A writer who was guiltv' of such improprieties 
jhad little right to blame the poet who made Hector 
j quote Aristotle, and represented Julio Romano as flour- 30 
ishing in the days of the oracle of Delphi. 

34. By such exertions as have been described, Johnson 
! supported himself till the year 1762. In that year a great 
I change in his circumstances took place. He had from a 



2 8 Life of Samuel Johnson 

child been an enemy of the reigning dynasty. His Jacobitel 
prejudices had been exhibited with little disguise both in 
his works and in his conversation. Even in his massy and 
elaborate Dictionary, he had, w^ith a strange want of taste 
5 and judgment, inserted bitter and contumelious reflections 
on the Whig party. The excise, which was a favorite re- 
source of Whig financiers, hi had designated as a hateful 
tax. He had railed against the commissioners of excise 
in language so coarse that they had seriously thought of 

10 prosecuting him. He had with difficulty been prevented 
from holding up the Lord Privy Seal by name as an 
example of the meaning of the word " renegade." A 
pension he had defined as pay given to a state hireling to 
betray his country ; a pensioner as a slave of state hired byti 

15 a stipend to obey a master. It seemed unlikely that the 
author of these definitions would himself be pensioned. 
But that was a time of wonders. George the Third had, 
ascended the throne; and had, in the course of a few? 
months, disgusted many of the old friends and conciliated 

20 many of the old enemies of his house. The city was be- 
coming mutinous. Oxford was becoming loyal. Caven- 
dishes and Bentincks were murmuring. Somersets andi 
Wyndhams were hastening to kiss hands. The head of thcj 
treasury was now Lord Bute, who was a Tory, and could L 

25 have no objection to Johnson's Toryism. Bute wished to 
be thought a patron of men of letters; and Johnson was 
one of the most eminent and one of the most needy men, 
of letters in Europe. A pension of three hundred a yearj; 
was graciously offered, and with very little hesitation 

30 accepted. 

35. This event produced a change in Johnson's whole ■ 
way of life. For the first time since his boyhood he nor 
longer felt the daily goad urging him to the daily toil. 
He was at' liberty, after thirty years of anxiety and drudg- 



I Life of Samuel Johnson 29 

pry, to indulge his constitutional indolence, to lie in bed 
jfill two in the afternoon, and to sit up talking till four 
rn the morning, without fearing either the printer's devil 
ipr the sheriff's officer. 
1'' 36. One laborious task indeed he had bound himself to 5 
heriorm. He had received large subscriptions for his 
Promised edition of Shakespeare; he had lived on those 
Subscriptions during some years ; and he could not without 
liisgrace omit to perform his part of the contract. His 
^|[riends repeatedly exhorted him to make an effort; and 10 
[ihe repeatedly resolved to do so. But, notwithstanding 
(their exhortations and his resolutions, month followed 
ibionth, year followed year, and nothing was done. He 
(brayed fervently against his idleness; he determined, as 
often as he received the sacrament, that he would no 15 
longer doze away and trifle away his time; but the spell 
•iunder which he lay resisted prayer and sacrament. His 
Iprivate notes at this time are made up of self-reproaches. 
j My indolence,'' he wrote on Easter eve in 1764, ''has 
unk into grosser sluggishness. A kind of strange oblivion 20 
as overspread me, so that I know not what has become 
f the last year." Easter 1765 came, and found him still 
tn the same state. " My time," he wrote, ^' has been un- 
:^rofitably spent, and seems as a dream that has left noth- 

Eng behind. My memory grows confused, and I know not 25 
low the days pass over me." Happily for his honor, the 
Icharm which held him captive was at length broken by no 
ijgentle or friendly hand. He had been weak enough to 
jpay serious attention to a story about a ghost which 
jaunted a house in Cock Lane, and had actually gone 30 
himself with some of his friends, at one in the morning, 
to St. John's Church, Clerkenwell, in the hope of receiv- 
ing a communication from the perturbed spirit. But the 
Ispirit, though adjured with all solemnity, remained ob- 



30 Life of Samuel Johnson 

stinately silent; and it soon appeared that a naughty girl 
of eleven had been amusing herself by making fools of so 
many philosophers. Churchill, who, confident in his pow- 
ers, drunk with popularity, and burning with party spirit, 
5 was looking for some man of established fame and Tory 
politics to insult, celebrated the Cock Lane Ghost in three 
cantos, nicknamed Johnson Pomposo, asked where the 
book was which had been so long promised and so liberally 
paid for, and directly accused the great moralist of cheating. 

10 This terrible word proved effectual; and in October 1765 
appeared, after a delay of nine years, the new edition of 
Shakespeare. 

37. This publication saved Johnson's character for 
honesty, but added nothing to the fame of his abilities and 

15 learning. The preface, though it contains some good pas- 
sages, is not in his best manner. The most valuable notes 
are those in which he had an opportunity of showing how ; 
attentively he had during many years observed human | 
life and human nature. The best specimen is the note on | 

20 the character of Polonius. Nothing so good is to be found I 
even in Wilhelm Meister's admirable examination of Ham- i 
let. But here praise must end. It would be difficult to 1 
name a more slovenly, a more worthless edition of any j 
great classic. The reader may turn over play after play | 

25 without finding one happy conjectural emendation, or one ,' 
ingenious and satisfactory explanation of a passage which 1 
had baffled preceding commentators. Johnson had, in his 
prospectus, told the world that he was peculiarly fitted i 
for the task .which he had undertaken, because he had, as a | 

30 lexicographer, been under the necessity of taking a wider i 
view of the English language than any of his predecessors. 1 
That his knowledge of our literature was extensive is in- j 
disputable. But, unfortunately, he had altogether neg- | 
lected that very part of our literature with which it is ) 



Life of Samuel Johnson 31 

especially desirable that an editor of Shakespeare should 
be conversant. It is dangerous to assert a negative. Yet 
little will be risked by the assertion, that in the two folio 
volumes of the English Dictionary there is not a single 
passage quoted from any dramatist of the Elizabethan 5 
age, except Shakespeare and Ben. Even from Ben the 
quotations are few. Johnson might easily, in a few months, 
have made himself well acquainted with every old play 
that was extant. But it never seems to have occurred to 
him^ that this was a necessary preparation for the work 10 
which he had undertaken. He would doubtless have ad- 
mitted that it would be the height of absurdity in a man 
who was not familiar with the works of ^^schylus and 
Euripides to publish an edition of Sophocles. Yet he ven- 
tured to publish an edition of Shakespeare, without hav- 15 
ing ever in his life, as far as can be discovered, read a 
single scene of Massinger, Ford, Decker, Webster, Mar- 
lowe, Beaumont, or Fletcher. His detractors were noisy 
and scurrilous. Those who most loved and honored him 
had little to say in praise of the manner in which he had 20 
discharged the duty of a commentator. He had, how- 
ever, acquitted himself of a debt which had long lain 
heavy on^ his conscience ; and he sank back into the repose 
from which the sting of satire had roused him. He long 
continued to live upon the fame which he had already won. 25 
He was honored by the University of Oxford with a Doc- 
tor's degree, by the Royal Academy with a professorship, 
and by the King with an inter^qew, in which his Majesty 
most graciously expressed a hope that so excellent a writer 
would not cease to write. In the interval, however, be- 30 
tween 1765 and 1775 Johnson published only two or 
three political tracts, the longest of which he could have 
produced in forty-eight hours, if he had worked as he 
worked on the Life of Savage and on Rasselas. 



32^ Life of Samuel Johnson 

38. But, though his pen was now idle, his tongue was 
active. The influence exercised by his conversation, di- 
rectly upon those with whom he lived, and indirectly on 
the whole literary world, was altogether without a parallel. 
5 His colloquial talents were indeed of the highest order. 
He had strong sense, quick discernment, wit, humor, im- 
mense knowledge of literature and of life, and an infinite 
store of curious anecdotes. As respected style, he spoke 
far better than he wrote. Every sentence which dropped 

10 from his lips was as correct in structure as the most nicely 
balanced period of the Rambler, But in his talk there 
were no pompous triads, and little more than a fair pro- 
portion of words in osity and ation. All was simplicity, 
ease, and vigor. He uttered his short, weighty, and pointed 

15 sentences with a power of voice, and a justness and 
energy of emphasis, of which the effect was rather in-' 
creased than diminished by the rollings of his huge form, 
and by the asthmatic gaspings and puffings in which the 
peals of his eloquence generally ended. Nor did the lazi- 

20 ness which made him unwilling to sit down to his desk 
prevent him from giving instruction or entertainment 
orally. To discuss questions of taste, of learning, of 
casuistry, in language so exact and so forcible that it might 
have been printed without the alteration of a word, was to 

25 him no exertion, but a pleasure. He loved, as he said, to 
fold his legs and have his talk out. He was ready to be- 
stow the overflowings of his full mind on anybody who 
would start a subject, on a fellow-passenger in a stage 
coach, or on the person who sate at the same table with 

30 him in an eating-house. But his conversation was nowhere 
so brilliant and striking as when he was surrounded by a 
few friends, whose abilities and knowledge enabled them, 
as he once expressed it, to send him back every ball that 
he threw. Some of these, in 1764, formed themselves intq 



Life of Samuel Johnson 33 

a club, which gradually became a formidable power in the 
commonwealth of letters. The verdicts pronounced by 
this conclave on new books were speedily known over all 
London, and were sufficient to sell off a whole edition in 
a day, or to condemn the sheets to the service of the 5 
trunk-maker and the pastry-cook. Nor shall we think 
this strange when we consider w^hat great and various 
talents and acquirements met in the little fraternity. 
Goldsmith was the representative of poetry and light litera- 
ture, Reynolds of the arts, Burke of political eloquence 10 
and political philosophy. There, too, were Gibbon, the 
greatest historian, and Jones, the greatest linguist, of the 
age. Garrick brought to the meetings his inexhaustible 
pleasantry, his incomparable mimicry, and his consum- 
mate knowledge of stage effect. Among the most con- 15 
stant attendants were two high-born and high-bred gentle- 
men, closely bound together by friendship, but of widely 
different characters and habits: Bennet Langton, dis- 
tinguished by his skill in Greek literature, by the ortho- 
doxy of his opinions, and by the sanctity of his life; and 20 
Topham Beauclerk, renowned for his amours, his knowl- 
edge of the gay world, his fastidious taste, and his sarcastic 
wit. To predominate over such a society was not easy. 
Yet even over such a society Johnson predominated. 
Burke might indeed have disputed the supremacy to which 25 
others were under the necessity of submitting. But Burke, 
though not generally a very patient listener, was content to 
take the second part when Johnson was present; and the 
club itself, consisting of so many eminent men, is to this 
day popularly designated as Johnson's Club. 30 

39. Among the members of this celebrated body was 
one to whom it has owed the greater part of its celebrity, 
yet who was regarded with little respect by his brethren, 
and had not without difficulty obtained a seat among them. 



34 Life of Samuel Johnson 

This was James Boswell, a young Scotch lawyer, heir to 
an honorable name and a fair estate. That he was a cox- 
comb and a bore, weak, vain, pushing, curious, garrulous, 
was obvious to all who were acquainted with him. That 
5 he could not reason, that he had no wit, no humor, no 
eloquence, is apparent from his writings. And yet his writ- 
ings are read beyond the Mississippi, and under the South- 
ern Cross, and are likely to be read as long as the English 
exists, either as a living or as a dead language. Nature i 

10 had made him a slave and an idolater. His mind resembled 
those creepers which the botanists call parasites, and which : 
can subsist only by clinging round the stems and imbibing ^ 
the juices of stronger plants. He must have fastened i 
himself on somebody. He might have fastened himself ( 

15 on Wilkes, and have become the fiercest patriot in the |, 
Bill of Rights Society. He might have fastened himself ti 
on Whitefield, and have become the loudest field preacher I 
among the Calvinistic Methodists. In a happy hour he ji 
fastened himself on Johnson. The pair might seem ill j)i 

20 matched. For Johnson had early been prejudiced against 
Bosweirs country. To a man of Johnson's strong under- 
standing and irritable temper, the silly egotism and adula- 
tion of Boswell must have been as teasing as the constant 
buzz of a fly. Johnson hated to be questioned ; and Bos- 

25 well was eternally catechising him on all kinds of subjects, 
and sometimes propounded such questions as '' What would j 
you do, sir, if you were locked up in a tower with a baby? '* f 
Johnson was a water drinker; and Boswell was a wine 
bibber, and indeed little better than a habitual sot. It "i 

30 was impossible that there should be perfect harmony be- 
tween two such companions. Indeed, the great man was 
sometimes provoked into fits of passion in which he said b 
things which the small man, during a few hours, seriously 
resented. Every quarrel, however, was soon made up. 



I 



Life of Samuel Johnson 35 

During twenty years the disciple continued to worship the 
master : the master continued to scold the disciple, to sneer 
at him, and to love him. The two friends ordinarily re- 
sided at a great distance from each other. Boswell prac- 
tised in the Parliament House of Edinburgh, and could 5 
pay only occasional visits to London. During those visits 
his chief business was to watch Johnson, to discover all 
Johnson's habits, to turn the conversation to subjects about 
which Johnson was likely to say something rem.arkable, and 
to fill quarto note books with minutes of what Johnson had 10 
said. In this way were gathered the materials out of 
which was afterwards constructed the most interesting 
biographical work in the world. 

'1^4C>. Soon after the club began to exist, Johnson formed 
i a connection less important indeed to his fame, but much 15 
more important to his happiness, than his connection with 
Boswell. Henry Thrale, one of the most opulent brewers 
lin the kingdom, a man of sound and cultivated under- 
i standing, rigid principles, and liberal spirit, w^as married to 
lone of those clever, kind-hearted, engaging, vain, pert 20 
; young women, who are perpetually doing or saying what is 
inot exactly right, but who, do or say what they may, are 
jalways agreeable. In 1765 the Thrales became acquainted 
jwith Johnson, and the acquaintance ripened fast into 
jfriendship. They were astonished and delighted by the 25 
jbrilhancy of his conversation. They were flattered by 
ifinding that a man so widely celebrated, preferred their 
Ihouse to any other in London. Even the peculiarities 
!\yhich seemed to unfit him for civilized society, his ges- 
jticulations, his rollings, his puffings, his mutterings, the 30 
Strange way in which he put on his clothes, the ravenous 
feagerness with which he devoured his dinner, his fits of 
imelancholy, his fits of anger, his frequent rudeness, his 
pccasional ferocity, increased the interest which his new 
' / 



36 Life of Samuel Johnson 

associates took in him. For these things were the cruel 
marks left behind by a life which had been one long con- ' 
flict with disease and with adversity. In a vulgar hack j 
writer such oddities would have excited only disgust, j 
5 But in a man of genius, learning, and virtue their effect ' 
was to add pity to admiration and esteem. Johnson soon j 
had an apartment at the brewery in Southwark, and a still f 
more pleasant apartment at the villa of his friends on Streat- ? 
ham Common. A large part of every year he passed in those ^ 

10 abodes, abodes which must have seemed magnificent and ' 
luxurious indeed, when compared with the dens in which 
he had generally been lodged. But his chief pleasures,^ 
were derived from what the astronomer in his Abyssinian j^ 
tale called ** the endearing elegance of female friendship." /■ 

15 Mrs. Thrale rallied him, soothed him, coaxed him, and, iff] 
she sometimes provoked him by her flippancy, made ample 
amends by listening to his reproofs with angelic sweetness 
of temper. /^When he was diseased in body and in mind, 
she was the most tender of nurses. No comfort that 

20 wealth could purchase, no contrivance that womanly in- 
genuity, set to work by womanly compassion, could devise, 
was wanting to his sick-room. He requited her kindness 
by an affection pure as the affection of a father, yet deli- 
cately tinged with a gallantry which, though awkward, 

25 must have been more flattering than the attentions of a 
crowd of the fools who gloried in the names, now obsolete, 
of Buck and Maccaroni. It should seem that a full half 
of Johnson's life, during about sixteen years, was passedj 
under the roof of the Thrales. He accompanied thd 

30 family sometimes to Bath, and sometimes to Brighton, 
once to Wales, and once to Paris. But he had at the 
same time a house in one of the narrow and gloomy court? 
on the north of Fleet Street. In the garrets was hi? 
library, a large and miscellaneous collection of books, fall- 



Life of Samuel Johnson 37 

ing to pieces and begrimed with dust. On a lower floor 
he sometimes, but very rarely, regaled a friend with a plain 
I dinner, a veal pie, or a leg of lamb and spinach, and a 
I rice pudding. Nor was the dwelling uninhabited during 
I his long absences. It was the home of the most extraor- 5 
; dinary assemblage of inmates that ever was brought to- 
, gether. At the head of the establishment Johnson had 
I placed an old lady named Williams, whose chief recom- 
l mendations were her blindness and her poverty. But, in 
I spite of her murmurs and reproaches, he gave an asylum 10 

to another lady who was as poor as herself, Mrs. Des- 

I mioulins, whose family he had known many years before 

i in Staffordshire. Room was found for the daughter of 

I Mrs. Desmoulins, and for another destitute damsel, who 

I was generally addressed as Miss Carmichael, but whom 15 

j her generous host called Polly. An old quack doctor 

named Levett, who bled and dosed coal-heavers and 

i hackney coachmen, and received for fees crusts of bread, 

bits of bacon, glasses of gin, and sometimes a little copper, 

completed this strange menagerie. All these poor crea- 20 

tures were at constant war with each other, and with 

, Johnson^s negro servant Frank. Sometimes, indeed, they 

I transferred their hostilities from the servant to the mas- 

jter, complained that a better table was not kept for 

jthem, and railed or maundered till their benefactor was 25 

I glad to make his escape to Streatham, or to the Mitre 

|j Tavern. And yet he, who was generally the haughtiest 

[|and most irritable of mankind, who was but too prompt 

to resent anything which looked like a slight on the part 

of a purse-proud bookseller, or of a noble and powerful 30 

jlpatron, bore patiently from mendicants, who, but for his 

J bounty, must have gone to the workhouse, insults more 

; provoking than those for which he had knocked down 

jOsborne and bidden defiance to Chesterfield. Year after 



38 Life of Samuel Johnson J 

year Mrs. Williams and Mrs. Desmoulins, Polly, and 
Levett continued to torment him and to live upon him. 
41. The course of life which has been described was 
interrupted in Johnson's sixty-fourth year by an important 
5 event. He had early read an account of the Hebrides, and 
had been much interested by learning that there was so 
near him a land peopled by a race which was still as rude 
and simple as in the Middle Ages. A w^ish to become 
intimately acquainted with a state of society so utterly 

10 unlike all that he had ever seen frequently crossed his mind. ' 
But' it is not probable that his curiosity would have over- 
come his habitual sluggishness, and his love of the smoke, 
the mud, and the cries of London, had not Boswell im- 
portuned him to attempt the adventure, and offered to be 

15 his squire. At length, in August 1773, Johnson crossed the 
Highland line, and plunged courageously into what was 
then considered, by most Englishmen, as a dreary and 
perilous wilderness. After w^andering about two months 
through the Celtic region, sometimes in rude boats which 

20 did not protect him from the rain, and sometimes on 
small shaggy ponies which could hardly bear his weight, 
he returned to his old haunts with a mind full of new 
images and new theories. During the following year he 
employed himself in recording his adventures. About thej 

25 beginning of 1775, his Journey to the Hebrides was pub- 
lished, and was, during some weeks, the chief subject of 
conversation in all circles in which any attention was paid 
to literature. The book is still read with pleasure. The 
narrative is entertaining; the speculations, w^hether sound 

30 or unsound, are alw^ays ingenious; and the style, though 
too stiff and pompous, is somewhat easier and more grace- 
ful than that of his early writings. His prejudice against 
the Scotch had at length become little more than matter of 
jest; and whatever remained of the old feeling had been 



Life of Samuel Johnson 39 



] -■ . . 

i effectuallv removed by the kind and respectful hospitality 
' with which he had been received in every part of Scotland. 
- It was, of course, not to be expected that an Oxonian 
Tory should praise the Presbyterian polity and ritual, or 
that an eye accustomed to the hedgerows and parks^ of 5 
England should not be struck by the bareness of Ber^vick- 
shire and East Lothian. But even in censure Johnson's 
I tone is not unfriendly. The most enlightened Scotch- 
I men, with Lord Mansfield at their head, were well pleased. 
But some foolish and ignorant Scotchmen were moved 10 
to anger by a little unpalatable truth which was mingled 
with^much eulog}', and assailed him whom they chose 
to consider as the enemy of their country, with libels 
much more dishonorable to their countr}^ than anything 
that he had ever said or written. They published para- 15 
graphs in the newspapers, articles in the magazines, six- 
penny pamphlets, five-shilling books. One scribbler abused 
Johnson for being blear-eyed; another for being a pen- 
sioner ; a third informed the world that one of the Doctor's 
uncles had been convicted of felony in Scotland, and 20 
had found that there was in that country one tree capable 
of supporting the weight of an Englishman. iMacpherson, 
whose Fingal had been proved in the Journey to be an 
impudent forgery, threatened to take vengeance with a 
cane. The only effect of this threat was that Johnson 25 
reiterated the charge of forgery in the most contemptuous 
terms, and walked about, during some time, with a cudgel, 
which, if the impostor had not been too wise to encounter 
it, would assuredly have descended upon him, to borrow 
the sublime language of his own epic poem, " like a ham- 30 
mer on the red son of the furnace." 

42. Of other assailants Johnson took no notice what- 
ever. He had early resolved never to be draw^n into con- 
troversy; and he adhered to his resolution with a stead- 



40 Life of Samuel Johnson 

fastness which is the more extraordinary, because he 
was, both intellectually and morally, of the stuff of which I 
controversialists are made. In conversation, he was a f 
singularly eager, acute, and pertinacious disputant. When *' 
5 at a loss for good reasons, he had recourse to sophistry ; and, 
when heated by altercation, he made unsparing use of sar- 
casm and invective. But, when he took his pen in his P 
hand, his whole character seemed to be changed. A hun- 
dred bad writers misrepresented him and reviled him ; but ^' 

10 not one of the hundred could boast of having been thought 
by him worthy of a refutation, or even of a retort. The f- 
Kenricks, Campbells, MacNicols, and Hendersons did 1^ 
their best to annoy him, in the hope that he would give f 
them importance by answering them. But the reader will j^ 

15 in vain search his works for any allusion to Kenrick or f 
Campbell, to MacNicol or Henderson. One Scotchman, 
bent on vindicating the fame of Scotch learning, defied j 
him to the combat in a detestable Latin hexameter. 

I 
** Maxime, si tu vis, cupio contendere tecum." i 

i 
20 But Johnson took no notice of the challenge. He had ! 
learned, both from his own observation and from literary 
history, in which he was deeply read, that the place of 
books in the public estimation is fixed, not by what is 
written about them, but by what is written in them; and 
25 that an author whose works are likely to live is very un- 
wise if he stoops to wrangle with detractors whose works 
are certain to die. He always maintained that fame was a 
shuttlecock which could be kept up only by being beaten 
back, as well as beaten forw^ard, and which would soon 
30 fall if there were only one battledore. No saying was 
oftener in his mouth than that fine apothegm of Bentley, 
that no man was ever written down but by himself. 



Life of Samuel Johnson 41 

I 43. Unhappily, a few months after the appearance of 
' the Journey to the Hebrides, Johnson did what none of 
: his envious assailants could have done, and to a certain 
i extent succeeded in writing himself down. The disputes 
{between England and her American colonies had reached 5 
,1 a point at which no amicable adjustment w^as possible, 
i Civil war was evidently impending ; and the ministers 
;j seem to have thought that the eloquence of Johnson might 
! with advantage be employed to inflame the nation against 
I the opposition here, and against the rebels beyond the 10 
Atlantic. He had already written two or three tracts in 
I defense of the foreign and domestic policy of the govern- 
ment ; and those tracts, though hardly worthy of him, were 
much superior to the crowd of pamphlets which lay on 
the counters of Almon and Stockdale. But his Taxation 15 
no Tyranny was a pitiable failure. The very title was a 
silly phrase, which can have been recommended to his 
choice by nothing bi>t a jingling alliteration which he 
ought to have despised. The arguments were such as 
boys use in debating societies. The pleasantry was as awk- 20 
ward as the gambols of a hippopotamus. Even Boswell 
I was forced to own that, in this unfortunate piece, he could 
i detect no trace of his master's powers. The general 
1 opinion was that the strong faculties which had produced 
j the Dictionary and the Rambler were beginning to feel 25 
I the effect of time and of disease, and that the old man 
{ would best consult his credit by writing no more, 
j 44. But this was a great mistake. Johnson had failed, 
not because his mind was less vigorous than when he wrote 
I Rasselas in the evenings of a week, but because he had 30 
I foolishly chosen, or suffered others to choose for him, a 
! subject such as he would at no time have been competent 
; to treat. He was in no sense a statesman. He never 
i willingly read or thought or talked about affairs of state. 



42 Life of Samuel Johnson 

He loved biography, literary history, the history of man- 
ners ; but political history was positively distasteful to him. 
The question at issue between the colonies and the mother 
country was a question about which he had really noth- 

5 ing to say. He failed, therefore, as the greatest men must 
fail when they attempt to do that for w^hich they are unfit ; 
as Burke would have failed if Burke had tried to write | 
comedies like those of Sheridan; as Reynolds w^ould have; 
failed if Reynolds had tried to paint landscapes like those! 

ID of Wilson. Happily, Johnson soon had an opportunity of! 
proving most signally that his failure was not to be ascribed ; 

y/to intellectual decay. j 

I V\ 45. On Easter eve 1777, some persons, deputed by aj 
*/ \ meeting which consisted of forty of the first booksellers ini 

IS London, called upon him. Though he had some Scruplesj 
about doing business at that season, he received his visitorsf 
with much civility. They came to inform him that a newj 
edition of the English poets, from Cowley downwards,! 
was in contemplation, and to ask him to furnish shorti 

20 biographical prefaces. He readily undertook the task, aj 
task for which he was pre-eminently qualified. His, 
knowledge of the literary history of England since thei 
Restoration was unrivaled. That knowledge he had de-' 
rived partly from books, and partly from sources which 

25 had long been closed; from old Grub Street traditions;! 
from the talk of forgotten poetasters and pamphleteers who', 
had long been lying in parish vaults; from the recollec-j' 
tions of such men as Gilbert Walmesley, who had con-| 
versed with the wits of Button's; Gibber, who had muti-! 

3olated the plays of two generations of dramatists; Orrery; 
who had been admitted to the society of Swift; andj 
Savage, who had rendered services of no very honorable| 
kind to Pope. The biographer therefore sate down to his 
task with a mind full of matter. He had at first intended 



Life of Samuel Johnson 43 

to give only a paragraph to every minor poet, and only 
four or five pages to the greatest name. But the flood of 
anecdote and criticism overflowed the narrovs^ channel. 
The w^orkj which was originally meant to consist only of a 
few sheets, swelled into ten volumes, small volumes, it is 5 
true, and not closely printed. The first four appeared in 
1779, the remaining six in 1781. 

46. The Lives of the Poets are, on the whole, the best 
of Johnson's works. The narratives are as entertaining as 
any novel. The remarks on life and on human nature are 10 
eminently shrewd and profound. The criticisms are often 
excellent, and, even when grossly and provoking unjust, 
well deserve to be studied. For, however erroneous they 
may be, they are never silly. They are the judgments of 

a mind trammeled by prejudice and deficient in sensibility, 15 
but vigorous and acute. They therefore generally contain 
a portion of valuable truth which deserves to be separated 
from the alloy; and, at the very worst, they mean some- 
thing, a praise to which much of what is called criticism 
in our time has no pretensions. 20 

47. Savage's Life Johnson reprinted nearly as it had 
appeared in 1744. Whoever, after reading that life, will 
turn to the other lives will be struck by the difference of 
style. Since Johnson had been at ease in his circum- 
stances he had written little and had talked much. When, 25 
therefore, he, after the lapse of years, resumed his pen, the 
mannerism which he had contracted while he was in the 
constant habit of elaborate composition was less perceptible 
than formerly; and his diction frequently had a colloquial 
ease which it had formerly wanted. The improvement 30 
may be discerned by a skilful critic in the Journey to the 
Hebrides, and in the Lives of the Poets is so obvious that 

it cannot escape the notice of the most careless reader. 

48. Among the lives the best are perhaps those of 



44 Life of Samuel Johnson 

Cowley, Dryden, and Pope. The very worst is, beyond 
all doubt, that of Gray. 

49. This great work at once became popular. There 
was, indeed, much just and much unjust censure: but 
5 even those who were loudest in blame were attracted by 
the book in spite of themselves. Malone computed the 
gains of the publishers at five or six thousand pounds. But 
the writer was very poorly remunerated. Intending at 
first to write very short prefaces, he had stipulated for 

10 only two hundred guineas. The booksellers, when they 
saw how far his performance had surpassed his promise, 
added only another hundred. Indeed, Johnson, though he 
did not despise, or affect to despise, money, and though his 
strong sense and long experience ought to have qualified 

15 him to protect his own interests, seems to have been singu- 
larly unskilful and unlucky in his literary bargains. He 
was generally reputed the first English writer of his time. 
Yet several writers of his time sold their copyrights for 
sums such as he never ventured to ask. To give a single 

20 instance, Robertson received four thousand five hundred 
pounds for the History of Charles V ; and it is no disre- 
spect to the memory of Robertson to say that the History 
of Charles V is both a less valuable and a less amusing 
book than the Lives of the Poets, 

25 50. Johnson w^as now in his seventy-second year. The 
infirmities of age were coming fast upon him. That in- 
evitable event of which he never thought without horror 
was brought near to him ; and his whole life was darkened 
by the shadow of death. He had often to pay the cruel 

30 price of longevity. Every year he lost what could never 
be replaced. The strange dependents to whom he had 
given shelter, and to whom, in spite of their faults, he 
was strongly attached by habit, dropped off one by one; 
and, in the silence of his home, he regretted even the 



Life of Samuel Johnson 45 

noise of their scolding matches. The kind and generous 
Thrale was no more ; and it would have been well if his 
wife had been laid beside him. But she survived to be 
the laughing-stock of those who had envied her, and to 
draw from the eyes of the old man who had loved her 5 
beyond anything in the world tears far more bitter than 
he would have shed over her grave. With some esti- 
mable and many agreeable qualities, she was not made to 
be independent. The control of a mind more steadfast 
than her own was necessary to her respectability. While 10 
she was restrained by her husband, a man of sense and 
firmness, indulgent to her taste in trifles, but always the 
undisputed master of his house, her worst offences had 
been impertinent jokes, white lies, and short fits of pet- 
tishness ending in sunny good humor. But he was gone; 15 
and she was left an opulent widow of forty, with strong 
sensibility, volatile fancy, and slender judgment. She 
soon fell in love with a music-master from Brescia, in 
whom nobody but herself could discover anything to ad- 
mire. Her pride, and perhaps some better feelings, strug- 20 
gled hard against this degrading passion. But the 
struggle irritated her nerves, soured her temper, and at 
length endangered her health. Conscious that her choice 
was one which Johnson could not approve, she became 
desirous to escape from his inspection. Her manner to- 25 
wards him changed. She was sometimes cold and some- 
times petulant. She did not conceal her joy w^hen he 
left Streatham; she never pressed him to return; and, if 
he came unbidden, she received him in a manner which 
convinced him he was no longer a welcome guest. He 30 
took the very intelligible hints which she gave. He read, 
for the last time, a chapter of the Greek Testament in the 
library which had been formed by himself. In a solemn 
and tender prayer he commended the house and its in- 



46 Life of Samuel Johnson 

mates to the Divine protection, and, with emotions which 
choked his voice and convulsed his powerful frame, left 
for ever that beloved home for the gloomy and desolate 
house behind Fleet Street, where the few and evil days 
5 which still remained to him were to run out. Here, in 
June 1783, he had a paralytic stroke, from which, how- 
ever, he recovered, and which does not appear to have at 
all impaired his intellectual faculties. But other maladies 
came thick upon him. His asthma tormented him day and 

10 night. Dropsical symptoms made their appearance. 
While sinking under a complication of diseases, he heard 
that the woman whose friendship had been the chief hap- 
piness of sixteen years of his life had married an Italian 
fiddler; that all London was crying shame upon her; and 

IS that the newspapers and magazines were filled with allu- 
sions to the Ephesian matron, and the two pictures in 
Hamlet. He vehemently said that he would try to for- 
get her existence. He never uttered her name. Every 
memorial of her which met his eye he flung into the fire. 

20 She meanwhile fled from the laughter and hisses of her 
countrymen and countryw^omen to a land where she was 
unknown, hastened across Mount Cenis, and learned, 
while passing a merry Christmas of concerts and lemonade 
parties at Milan, that the great man with whose name 

25 hers is inseparably associated had ceased to exist. 

51. He had, in spite of much mental and much bodily 
affliction, clung vehemently to life. The feeling described 
in that fine but gloomy paper which closes the series of 
his Idlers seemed to grow stronger in him as his last 

30 hour drew near. He fancied that he should be able to 
draw his breath more easily in a southern climate, and 
would probably have set out for Rome and Naples, but for 
his fear of the expense of the journey. That expense, in- 
deed, he had the irieans of defraying; for he had laid up 



Life of Samuel Johnson 47 

:about two thousand pounds, the fruit of labors which had 
made the fortune of several publishers. But he was unwill- 
jing to break in upon this hoard, and he seems to have wished 
ieven to keep its existence a secret. Some of his friends 
jhoped that the government might be induced to increase 5 
jhis pension to six hundred pounds a year, but this hope 
Iwas disappointed, and he resolved to stand one Eng- 
Uish winter more. That winter was his last. His legs 
■ grew weaker ; his breath grew shorter ; the fatal water 
' gathered fast, in spite of incisions which he, courageous 10 
^ against pain, but timid against death, urged his surgeons 
I to make deeper and deeper. Though the tender care 
I which had mitigated his sufferings during months of sick- 
I ness at Streatham was withdrawn, he was not left deso- 
! late. The ablest physicians and surgeons attended him, 15 

and refused to accept fees from him. Burke parted from 
. him with deep emotion. Windham sate much in the sick- 
room, arranged the pillows, and sent his own servant to 
watch at night by the bed. Frances Burney, whom the 
old man had cherished with fatherly kindness, stood 20 
weeping at the door; while Langton, whose piety emi- 
nently qualified him to be an adviser and comforter at 
such a time, received the last pressure of his friend's 
hand within. When at length the moment, dreaded 
through so many years, came close, the dark cloud passed 25 
away from Johnson's mind. His temper became unusually 
patient and gentle; he ceased to think with terror of death, 
and of that which lies beyond death; and he spoke much 
of the mercy of God, and of the propitiation of Christ. 
In this serene frame of mind he died on the 13th of De- 30 
cember 1784. He was laid, a week later, in Westminster 
Abbey, among the eminent men of whom he had been the 
historian, — Cowley and Denham, Dryden and Congreve, 
Gay, Prior, and Addison. 



48 Life of Samuel Johnson 

52. Since his death the popularity of his works — the 
Lives of the Poets, and, perhaps, the Vanity of Human \ 
Wishes, excepted — has greatly diminished. His Diction- I 
ary has been altered by editors till it can hardly be called i 
5 his. An allusion to his Rambler or his Idler is not readily 
apprehended in literary circles. The fame even of Rasselas \ 
has grown somewhat dim. But, though the celebrity of j 
the writings may have declined, the celebrity of the writer, ; 
strange to say, is as great as ever. Boswell's book has ' 

ID done for him more than the best of his own books could do. 

^ The memory of other authors is kept alive by their works. 
But the memory of Johnson keeps many of his works alive. 
The old philosopher is still among us in the brown coat , 
with the metal buttons and the shirt which ought to be at ; 

15 wash, blinking, puffing, rolling his head, drumming with | 
his fingers, tearing his meat like a tiger, and swallowing 
his tea in oceans. No human being w^ho has been more , 
than seventy years in the grave is so well known to us. ! 
And it is but just to say that our intimate acquaintance! 

20 with what he would himself have called the anf ractuosities ; 
of his intellect and of his temper serves only to strengthen i 
our conviction that he was both a great and a good man. j 



SELECTIONS FROM JOHNSON 



I LETTER TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE THE 
I EARL OF CHESTERFIELD 

February 7, 1755. 
jMy Lord: 

j I have lately been informed by the proprietor of the 
Worldj that two papers, in which my Dictionary is 
recommended to the public, were written by your Lord- 5 
ship. To be so distinguished is an honor which, being 
very little accustomed to favors from the great, I know 
not well how to receive, or in what terms to acknowledge. 
I When, upon some slight encouragement, I first visited 
j your Lordship, I was overpowered, like the rest of man- 10 
kind, by the enchantment of your address; and I could 
not forbear to wish that I might boast myself '' Le 
vainqueur du vainqueur de la terre"; that I might obtain 
that regard for which I saw the world contending; but I 
found my attendance so little encouraged, that neither 15 
pride nor modesty would suffer me to continue it. WTien 
I had once addressed your Lordship in public, I had ex- 
hausted all the art of pleasing which a retired and un- 
courtly scholar can possess. I had done all that I could ; 
j and no man is well pleased to have his all neglected, be 20 
I It ever so little. 

Seven years, my Lord, have now passed, since I waited 
I in your outward rooms, or was repulsed from your door; 
I during which time I have been pushing on my work 
I through difficulties, of which it is useless to complain, and 25 
\ have brought it at last to the verge of publication, with- 
I out one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or 

51 



52 Selections from Johnson 

one smile of favor. Such treatment I did not expect, 
for I never had a Patron before. 

The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with 
Love, and found him a native of the rocks. 

5 Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with un- 
concern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, 
when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? 
The notice which you have been pleased to take of my 
labors, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been 

10 delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I 
am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and 
do not want it. I hope it is no very cynical asperity not 
to confess obligations where no benefit has been received, 
or to be unwilling that the Public should consider me as 

15 owing that to a Patron, which Providence has enabled me 
to do for myself. 

Having carried on my work thus far with so little 
obligation to any favorer of learning, I shall not be dis- 
appointed though I should conclude it, if less be possible, 

20 with less ; for I have been long wakened from that dream 
of hope, in which I once boasted myself with so much 
exultation. 

My Lord, 

Your Lordship's most humble, 

25 Most obedient servant, 

Sam. Johnson. 



I 

j The Rambler, No. 60 53 

i 

The Rambler, No. 60 
Saturday, October IJ, 17 50 

— Quid sit pulchrum, quid turpe, quid utile, quid non, 
I Planius et melius Chrysippo et Crantore dicit. 

i — HoR. Ep. I. 2. 4. 



Whose works the beautiful and base contain, 

Of vice and virtue more instructive rules 

Than all the sober sages of the schools. — Francis. 

All joy or sorrow for the happiness or calamities of 
others is produced by an act of the imagination that 
realizes the event however fictitious, or approximates it 
however remote, by placing us, for a time, in the condi- 
tion of him whose fortune we contemplate; so that we 5 
feel, while the deception lasts, whatever motions would be 
excited by the same good or evil happening to ourselves. 
Our passions are therefore more strongly moved, in 
proportion as we can more readily adopt the pains or 
pleasure proposed to our minds, by recognizing them 10 
I as once our own, or considering them as naturally in- 
I cident to our state of life. It is not easy for the most 
i artful writer to give us an interest in happiness or 
[misery which we think ourselves never likely to feel, and 
I with which we have never yet been made acquainted. His- 15 
j tories of the downfall of kingdoms, and revolutions of 
i empires, are read with great tranquillity; the imperial 
I tragedy pleases common auditors only by its pomp of 
; ornament, and grandeur of ideas; and the man whose 
I faculties have been engrossed by business, and whose heart 20 
i never fluttered but at the rise or fall of the stocks, won- 



54 Selections from Johnson 

ders how the attention can be seized, or the affection 
agitated, by a tale of love. 

Those parallel circumstances and kindred images to 
which w^e readily conform our minds are, above all other 

5 writings, to be found in narratives of the lives of par- 
ticular persons; and therefore no species of writing seems 
more worthy of cultivation than biography, since none can 
be more delightful or more useful, none can more certainly 
enchain the heart by irresistible interest, or more widely 

10 diffuse instruction to every diversity of condition. 

The general and rapid narratives of history, which in- ' 
volve a thousand fortunes in the business of a day, and 
complicate innumerable incidents in one great transaction, j 
afford few lessons applicable to private life, which derives ■ 

15 its comforts and its wretchedness from the right or wrong 
management of things, which nothing but their frequency | 
makes considerable — '' Parva si non fiant quotidie," says j 
Pliny — and which can have no place in those relations r 
which never descend below the consultation of senates, ^ 

20 the motions of armies, and the schemes of conspirators. ( 

I have often thought that there has rarely passed a I 

life of which a judicious and faithful narrative w^ould 1^ 

not be useful. For, not only every man has, in the j 

mighty mass of the world, great numbers in the same ' 

25 condition with himself, to whom his mistakes and mis- ' 
carriages, escapes and expedients, would be of immediate 
and apparent use; but there is such an uniformity in the I 
state of man, considered apart from adventitious and 
separable decorations and disguises, that there is scarce' 

30 any possibility of good or ill, but is common to human | 
kind. A great part of the time of those who are placed j; 
at the greatest distance by fortune, or by temper, must 
unavoidably pass in the same manner; and though, w^hen 
the claims of nature are satisfied, caprice, and vanity, 



j The Rambler, No. 60 55 

and accident, begin to produce discriminations and pe- 
culiarities, yet the eye is not very heedful or quick which 
cannot discover the same causes still terminating their 
jinfluence in the same effects, though sometimes accelerated, 
sometimes retarded, or perplexed by multiplied combina- 5 
tions. We are all prompted by the same motives, all de- 
iceived by the same fallacies, all animated by hope, ob- 
structed by danger, entangled by desire, and seduced by 
pleasure. 

It is frequently objected to relations of particular lives, 10 
that they are not distinguished by any striking or wonder- 
jful vicissitudes. The scholar who passed his life among 
•his books, the merchant who conducted only his own 
affairs, the priest whose sphere of action was not ex- 
tended beyond that of his duty, are considered as no 15 
j proper objects of public regard, however they might have 
j excelled in their several stations, whatever might have 
I been their learning, integrity, and piety. But this notion 
I arises from false measures of excellence and dignity, and 
i must be eradicated by considering that, in the esteem 20 
of uncorrupted reason, what is of most use is of most 
value. 

It IS, indeed, not improper to take honest advantages 
of prejudice, and to gain attention by a celebrated name; 
but the business of the biographer is often to pass slightly 25 
over those performances and incidents which produce 
vulgar greatness, to lead the thoughts into domestic 
privacies, and display the minute details of daily life, 
where exterior appendages are cast aside, and men excel 
each other only by prudence and by virtue. The account 30 
of Thuanus is, with great propriety, said by its author 
to have been written that it might lay open to posterity 
the private and familiar character of that man, " cujus 
ingenium et candorem ex ipsius scriptis sunt olim semper 



5 6 Selections from Johnson 

miraturi " — *' whose candor and genius will to the end 
of time be by his writings preserved in admiration." 

There are many invisible circumstances which, whether 
we read as inquirers after natural or moral knowledge, 
5 whether we intend to enlarge our science, or increase 
our virtue, are more important than public occurrences. 
Thus Sallust, the great master of nature, has not forgot, 
in his account of Catiline, to remark that '' his walk was 
now quick, and again slow," as an indication of a mind 

10 revolving something with violent commotion. Thus the 
story of Melanchthon affords a striking lecture on the 
value of time, by informing us that, when he made an 
appointment, he expected not only the hour, but the 
minute to be fixed, that the day might not run out in 

15 the idleness of suspense ; and all the plans and enterprises 
of De Witt are now of less importance to the world, 
than that part of his personal character which represents 
him as *' careful of his health, and negligent of his 
life." 

20 But biography has often been allotted to writers w^ho ; 
seem very little acquainted with the nature of their I 
task, or very negligent about the performance. They j 
rarely afford any other account than might be collected j 
from public papers, but imagine themselves writing a \ 

2$ life when they exhibit a chronological series of actions j 
of preferments; and so little regard the manners or be- 
havior of their heroes, that more knowledge may be gained i 
of a man's real character, by a short conversation with \ 
one of his servants, than from a formal and studied nar- 

30 rative, begun with his pedigree, and ended with his . 
funeral. j 

If now and then they condescend to inform the world 
of particular facts, they are not always so happy as 
to select the most important. I know not wxll what ad- j 



The Rambler, No. 60 57 

vantage posterity can receive from the only circumstance 
by which Tickell has distinguished Addison from the rest 
of mankind, ''the irregularity of his pulse"; nor can 
I think myself overpaid for the time spent in reading the 
life of Malherb by being enabled to relate after the learned 5 
biographer, that Malherb had two predominant opinions: 
one, that the looseness of a single woman might destroy 
all her boast of ancient descent ; the other, that the French 
beggars made use very improperly and barbarously of 
the phrase '' noble gentleman," because either word in- 10 
eluded the sense of both. 

There are, indeed, some natural reasons why these 
narratives are often written by such as were not likely 
to give much instruction or delight, and why most ac- 
counts of particular persons are barren and useless. If a 15 
life be delayed till interest and envy are at an end, we 
may hope for impartiality, but must expect little intelli- 
gence ; for the incidents which give excellence to biography 
are of a volatile and evanescent kind, such as soon escape 
the memory, and are rarely transmitted by tradition. We 20 
know how few can portray a living acquaintance, except 
by his most prominent and observable particularities, and 
the grosser features of his mind ; and it may be easily 
imagined how much of this little knowledge may be lost 
in imparting it, and how soon a succession of copies will 25 
lose all resemblance of the original. 

If the biographer writes from personal knowledge, and 
makes haste to gratify the public curiosity, there is 
danger lest his interest, his fear, his gratitude, or his 
tenderness, overpower his fidelity, and tempt him to con- 30 
ceal, if not to invent. There are many who think it an 
act of piety to hide the faults or failings of their friends, 
even when they can no longer suffer by their detection; 
we therefore see whole ranks of characters adorned with 



58 Selections from Johnson 

uniform panegyric, and not to be known from one another, 
but by extrinsic and casual circumstances. " Let me re- 
member,'' says Hale, ''when I find myself inclined to 
pity a criminal, that there is likewise a pity due to the 
5 country." If we owe regard to the memory of the dead, 
there is yet more respect to be paid to knowledge, to 
virtue, and to truth. 



The Idler, No. 85 

Saturday, December i, 1759 

One of the peculiarities which distinguish the present 
age is the multiplication of books. Every day brings new 
10 advertisements of literary undertakings, and we are flat- 
tered with repeated promises of growing wise on easier 
terms than our progenitors. 

How much either happiness or knowledge is advanced 
by this multitude of authors, it is not very easy to decide. 
15 He that teaches us anything which w^e knew not before, 
is undoubtedly to be reverenced as a master. 

He that conveys knowledge by more pleasing ways, may 
very properly be loved as a benefactor; and he that sup- 
plies life with innocent amusement, will be certainly 
20 caressed as a pleasing companion. 

But few of those who fill the world with books, have 
any pretensions to the hope either of pleasing or instruct- 
ing. They have often no other task than to lay two 
books before them, out of w^hich they compile a third, 
25 without any new materials of their own, and with very 
little application of judgment to those which former au- 
thors have supplied. 

That all compilations are useless, I do not assert. 



The Idler, No. 85 59 

Particles of science are often very widely scattered. Writ- 
ers of extensive comprehension have incidental remarks 
upon topics very remote from the principal subject, which 
are often more valuable than formal treatises, and which 
yet are not known because they are not promised in the 5 
title. He that collects those under proper heads is very 
laudably employed; for though he exerts no great abilities 
in the work, he facilitates the progress of others, and, by 
making that easy of attainment which is already written, 
may give some mind, more vigorous or more adventurous 10 
than his own, leisure for new thoughts and original 
designs. 

But the collections poured lately from the press have 
been seldom made at any great expense of time or in- 
quiry, and therefore only serve to distract choice without 15 
supplying any real want. 

It is observed that a corrupt society has many laws; 
I know not whether it is not equally true, that an ignorant 
age has many books. When the treasures of ancient 
knowledge lie unexamined, and original authors are neg- 20 
lected and forgotten, compilers and plagiaries are en- 
couraged, who give us again what we had before, and 
grow great by setting before us what our own sloth had 
hidden from our view. 

Yet are not even these writers to be indiscriminately 25 
censured and rejected. Truth, like beauty, varies in its 
fashions, and is best recommended by different dresses 
to different minds; and he that recalls the attention of 
mankind to any part of learning which time has left 
behind it, may be truly said to advance the literature of 30 
his own age. As the manners of nations vary, new 
topics of persuasion become necessary, and new^ combina- 
tions of imagery are produced; and he that can accom- 
modate himself to the reigning taste, may ahvays have 



6o Selections from Johnson 

readers who perhaps would not have looked upon better] 
performances. 

To exact of every man that writes that he should say] 
something new, would be to reduce authors to a small 
5 number; to oblige the most fertile genius to say onlyj 
what is new, would be to contract his volumes to a few 
pages. Yet, surely, there ought to be some bounds to] 
repetition; libraries ought no more to be heaped forevei 
with the same thoughts differently expressed, than w^ith 

10 the same books differently decorated. 

The good or evil which these secondary writers produce 
is seldom of any long duration. As they owe their exist- 
ence to change of fashion, they commonly disappear when 
a new fashion becomes prevalent. The authors that in 

15 any nation last from age to age are very few, because 
there are very few that have any other claim to notice 
than that they catch hold on present curiosity, and gratify 
some accidental desire, or produce some temporary con- 
veniency. 

20 But however the writers of the day may despair of 
future fame, they ought at least to forbear any present 
mischief. Though they cannot arrive at eminent heights 
of excellence, they might keep themselves harmless. They 
might take care to inform themselves before they attempt 

25 to inform others, and exert the little influence which 
they have for honest purposes. 

But such is the present state of our literature, that the 
ancient sage, who thought a great book a great evil, would 
now think the multitude of books a multitude of evils. 

30 He would consider a bulky writer who engrossed a year, 
and a swarm of pamphleteers who stole each an hour, 
as equal wasters of human life, and would make no other 
difference between them, than between the beast of prey 
and a flight of locusts. 



The Idler, No. 103 61 

The Idler, No. 103 

Saturday, April 5, jy6o 

Respicere ad longce jussit spatia ultima 'vita. — Juv. 

Much of the pain and pleasure of mankind arises from 
I the conjectures which every one makes of the thoughts of 
J others; we all enjoy praise which we do not hear, and 
i resent contempt which w^e do not see. The Idler may 

therefore be forgiven, if he suffers his imagination to 5 
; represent to him what his readers will say or think, when 
they are informed that they have now his last paper in 
their hands. 

Value is more frequently raised by scarcity than by use. 
That which lay neglected when it was common, rises in 10 
estimation as its quantity becomes less. We seldom learn 
the true want of what we have, till it is discovered that 
we can have no more. 

This essay will, perhaps, be read with care even by 
those who have not yet attended to any other; and he 15 
that finds this late attention recompensed, will not forbear 
to wish that he had bestowed it sooner. 

Though the Idler and his readers have contracted no 
close friendship, they are perhaps both unwilling to part. 
There are few things not purely evil, of which we can 20 
say, without some emotion of uneasiness, this is the last. 
Those who never could agree together, shed tears when 
mutual discontent has determined them to final separa- 
tion; of a place which has been frequently visited, though 
without pleasure, the last look is taken with heaviness 25 
of heart; and the Idler, with all his chillness of tran- 
quillity, is not wholly unaffected by the thought that his 
last essay is now before him. 



62 Selections from Johnson 

The secret horror of the last is inseparable from zm 
thinking being, whose life is limited, and to whom death ■ 
is dreadful. We always make a secret comparison be- -^ 
tween a part and the whole ; the termination of any i 
5 period of life reminds us that life itself has likewise its 
termination; when we have done any thing for the last 
time, we involuntarily reflect that a part of the days 
allotted to us is past, and that as more is past there is less 
remaining. 

10 It IS very happily and kindly provided, that in every 
life there are certain pauses and interruptions, which 
force consideration upon the careless, and seriousness 
upon the light; points of time where one course of action 
ends, and another begins; and by vicissitudes of fortune, 

15 or alteration of employment, by change of place or loss 
of friendship, we are forced to say of something, this is 
the last. 

An even and unvaried tenor of life always hides from 
our apprehension the approach of its end. Succession is 

20 not perceived but by variation ; he that lives to-day as he 
lived yesterday, and expects that as the present day is such 
will be the morrow, easily conceives time as running in 
a circle and returning to itself. The uncertainty of our 
duration is impressed commonly by dissimilitude of con- 

25 dition ; it is only by finding life changeable that we are 
reminded of its shortness. 

This conviction, however forcible at every new impres- 
sion, is every moment fading from the mind; and partly 
by the inevitable incursion of new images, and partly by 

30 voluntary exclusion of unwelcome thoughts, we are again 
exposed to the universal fallacy; and we must do another 
thing for the last time, before we consider that the time 
is nigh when we shall do no more. 

As the last Idler is published in that solemn week 



The History of Rasselas 63 

I which the Christian world has always set apart for the 
■' examination of the conscience, the review of life, the ex- 
I tinction of earthly desires, and the renovation of holy pur- 
[ poses ; I hope that my readers are already disposed to view 
I every incident with seriousness, and improve it by medita- 5 
1; tion; and that, when they see this series of trifles brought 
i to a conclusion, they will consider that by outliving the 
I Idler, they have passed weeks, months, and years, which 
I are now no longer in their power; that an end must in 
j, time be put to everything great as to everything little; 10 
that to life must come its last hour, and to this system 
of being its last day, the hour at which probation ceases, 
and repentance will be vain; the day in which every 
work of the hand, and imagination of the heart, shall 
be brought to judgment, and an everlasting futurity 15 
shall be determined by the past. 



THE HISTORY OF RASSELAS, PRINCE OF 

ABYSSINIA 

Chapter I 

(Description of a Palace in a Valley) 

Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, 
and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who 
i expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and 
that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied 20 
by the morrow; attend to the history of Rasselas, Prince 
of Abyssinia. 

Rasselas was the fourth son of the mighty emperor, in 
whose dominions the Father of Waters begins his course : 
whose bounty pours down the streams of plenty, and scat- 25 
ters over half the world the harvests of Eg}'pt. 



64 Selections from Johnson 

According to the custom which has descended from age 

to age among the monarchs of the torrid zone, Rasselas 

was confined in a private palace, with the other sons and 

daughters of Abyssinian royalty, till the order of suc- 

5 cession should call him to the throne. 

The place which the wisdom or policy of antiquity had 
destined for the residence of the Abyssinian princes, was 
a spacious valley in the kingdom of Amhara, surrounded 
on every side by mountains, of which the summits over- 

10 hang the middle part. The only passage, by which it 
could be entered, was a cavern that passed under a rock, 
of which it has been long disputed whether it was the 
work of nature or of human industry. The outlet of the 
cavern was concealed by thick wood, and the mouth 

15 which opened into the valley was closed w^th gates of 
iron, forged by the artificers of ancient days, so massy that 
no man could without the help of engines open or shut 
them. 

From the mountains on every side, rivulets descended 

20 that filled all the valley with verdure and fertility, and 
formed a lake in the middle inhabited by fish of every 
species, and frequented by every fowl whom nature has 
taught to dip the wing in water. This lake discharged 
its superfluities by a stream which entered a dark cleft of 

25 the mountain on the northern side, and fell with dread- 
ful noise from precipice to precipice till it was heard no 
more. 

The sides of the mountains were covered with trees, 
the banks of the brooks were diversified with flowers; 

30 every blast shook spices from the rocks, and every month 
dropped fruits upon the ground. All animals that bite 
the grass, or browse the shrub, whether wild or tame, f 
wandered in this extensive circuit, secured from beasts ■ 
of prey by the mountains which confined them. On one f 



The History of Rasselas 65 

part were flocks and herds feeding in the pastures, on an- 
other all the beasts of chase frisking in the lawns; the 
sprightly kid was bounding on the rocks, the subtle 
monkey frolicking in the trees, and the solemn elephant 
reposing in the shade. All the diversities of the world 5 
were brought together, the blessings of nature were col- 
lected, and its evils extracted and excluded. 

The valley wide and fruitful, supplied its inhabitants 
with the necessaries of life; and all delights and super- 
fluities were added at the annual visit which the emperor 10 
paid his children, when the iron gate was opened to the 
sound of music; and during eight days every one that re- 
sided in the valley was required to propose whatever 
might contribute to make seclusion pleasant, to fill up 
vacancies of attention, arid lessen the tediousness of time. 15 
Every desire was immediately granted. All the artificers 
of pleasure were called to gladden the festivity; the 
musicians exerted the power of harmony, and the dancers 
showed their activity before the princes, in hope that they 
should pass their lives in this blissful captivity, to which 20 
those only were admitted whose performance was thought 
able to add novelty to luxury. Such was the appearance 
of security and delight which this retirement afforded, 
that they, to whom it was new, always desired that it 
might be perpetual ; and as those, on whom the iron gate 25 
had once closed, were never suffered to return, the 
effect of long experience could not be known. Thus 
every year produced new schemes of delight, and new 
competitors for imprisonment. 

The palace stood on an eminence raised about thirty 30 
paces above the surface of the lake. It was divided into 
many squares or courts, built with greater or less mag- 
nificence, according to the rank of those for whom they 
were designed. The roofs were turned into arches of 



66 Selections from Johnson 

mossy stone, joined by a cement that grew harder by time, 
and the building stood from century to century deriding 
the solstitial rains and equinoctial hurricanes, without 
need of reparation. 

5 This house, which was so large as to be fully known to 
none but some ancient officers who successively inherited 
the secrets of the place, was built as if suspicion herself 
had dictated the plan. To every room there was an 
open and secret passage, every square had a communica- 

10 tion w^ith the rest, either from the upper stories by pri- 
vate galleries, or by the subterranean passages from the 
lower apartments. Many of the columns had unsus- 
pected cavities, in which a long race of monarchs had 
deposited their treasures. They then closed up the open- . 

15 ing with marble, which was never to be removed but in , 
the utmost exigencies of the kingdom ; and concealed , 
their accumulations in a book which was itself concealed f 
in a tower not entered but by the emperor, attended \ 
by the prince who stood next in succession. 



Chapters II-IX |i 

(Summary) ' 

20 Rasselas gradually becomes dissatisfied with life in this' 
happy valley, feeling that '' man surely has some latent 
sense for which this place affords no gratification, or 
he has some desires distinct from sense, which must be 
satisfied before he can be happy." It is presently sug- 

25 gested to Rasselas that if he could see the miseries of the: 
world, he would know how to value his present statet 
This suggestion he accepts, and looks about him to dis- 
cover how he may escape from the happy valley. Escap< 






The History of Rasselas 67 

by flying proves decidedly unpractical. While meditat- 
ing a more favorable method of release, Rasselas hears a 
poem, by a certain sage named Imlac, on the various 
conditions of humanity. Finding in Imlac one who 
well knew the world, Rasselas persuades the sage to 5 
narrate the story of his life. As a philosophical observer 
of many countries Imlac has much to say. One por- 
tion of his reflections is the chapter on poetry (Chapter X). 



Chapter X 

(Imlac's History Continued. A Dissertation upon 

Poetry) 

''Wherever I went, I found that poetr\^ was considered 
as the highest learning, and regarded with a veneration 10 
; somewhat aproaching to that which man would pay to the 
I Angelic Nature. And yet it fills me with wonder, that, 
I in almost all countries, the most ancient poets are con- 
jsidered as the best: whether it be that every other kind 
jof knowledge is an acquisition gradually attained, and 15 
ipoetry is a gift conferred at once; or that the first poetry 
jof every nation surprised them as a novelty, and retained 
the credit by consent which it received by accident at first ; 
|or whether, as the province of poetry is to describe nature 
'land passion, which are always the same, the first writers 20 
ittook possession of the most striking objects for descrip- 
ntion and the most probable occurrences for fiction, and 
|eft nothing to those that followed them, but transcrip- 
■jtion of the same events, and new combinations of the same 
eejmages. Whatever be the reason, it is commonly observed 25 
!..|:hat the early writers are in possession of nature, and 
s-their followers of art: that the first excel in strength 
^^and invention, and the latter in elegance and refinement. 



68 Selections from Johnson 

" I was desirous to add my name to this illustrious 
fraternity. I read all the poets of Persia and Arabia, and 
was able to repeat by memory the volumes that are sus- 
pended in the mosque of Mecca. But I soon found that 
5 no man was ever great by imitation. My desire of excel- 
lence impelled me to transfer my attention to nature and 
to life. Nature was to be my subject, and men to be my 
auditors: I could never describe what I had not seen: I ( 
could not hope to move those with delight or terror, whose 

10 interests and opinions I did not understand. 

" Being now resolved to be a poet, I saw every thing 
with a new purpose; my sphere of attention was suddenly ^ 
magnified: no kind of knowledge was to be overlooked. 
I ranged mountains and deserts for images and resem- 

15 blances, and pictured upon my mind every tree of the 
forest and flower of the valley. I observed with equal , 
care the crags of the rock and the pinnacles of the palace, f 
Sometimes I wandered along the mazes of the rivulet, f 
and sometimes watched the changes of the summer clouds. \ 

20 To a poet nothing can be useless. Whatever is beautiful, " 
and whatever is dreadful, must be familiar to his imagina-Jj 
tion: he must be conversant with all that is awfully vast; 
or elegantly little. The plants of the garden, the animals 
of the wood, the minerals of the earth, and meteors of the 

25 sky, must all concur to store his mind with inexhaustible, 
variety: for every idea is useful for the enforcement or 
decoration of moral or religious truth; and he, whOj 
knows most, will have most power of diversifying hisl 
scenes, and of gratifying his reader with remote allu- 

30 sions and unexpected instruction. 

** All the appearances of nature I was therefore careful,' 
to study, and every country which I have surveyed, has 
contributed something to my poetical powers.'* 

"In so wide a survey,'' said the prince, "you must 



^ 



The History of Rasselas 69 

^ surely have left much unobserved. I have lived till now, 

within the circuit of these mountains, and yet cannot walk 

t abroad without the sight of something which I had never 

beheld before, or never heeded." 
\ '' The business of a poet," said Imlac, '' is to examine, 5 
] not the individual, but the species; to remark general 
i properties and large appearances; he does not number 
the streaks of the tulip, or describe the different shades in 
the verdure of the forest. He is to exhibit in his por- 
traits of nature such prominent and striking features as 10 
recall the original to every mind; and must neglect the 
minuter discriminations, which one may have remarked, 
and another have neglected, for those characteristics which 
are alike obvious to vigilance and carelessness. 

" But the knowledge of nature is only half the task 15 
of a poet; he must be acquainted likewise with all the 
modes of life. His character requires that he estimate 
the happiness and misery of every condition; observe the 
power of all the passions in all their combinations, and 
\ trace the changes of the human mind as they are modified 20 
i by various institutions, and accidental influences, of climate 
or custom, from the sprlghtliness of infancy to the despond- 
.: ence of decrepitude. He must divest himself of the 
prejudices of his age or country; he must consider right 
I and wrong in their abstracted and invariable state ; he 25 
! must disregard present laws and opinions, and rise to 
■ general and transcendental truths, which will always be 
1 the same : he must therefore content himself with the 
I slow progress of his name; contemn the applause of his 
I own time, and commit his claims to the justice of pos- 30 
iterity. He must write as the interpreter of nature, and 
jthe legislator of mankind, and consider himself as presiding 
I over the thoughts and manners of future generations; as a 

I being superior to time and place. 

i 



yo Selections from Johnson 

** His labor is not yet at an end: he must know many 
languages and many sciences; and, that his style may be 
worthy of his thoughts, must, by incessant practice, fa- 
miliarize to himself every delicacy of speech and grace of 
5 harmony." 

Prayers 

{On Undertaking the Rambler) 

Almighty God, the giver of all good things, without 
whose help all labor is ineiffectual, and without whose 
grace all wisdom is folly; grant, I beseech Thee, that in 
this undertaking thy Holy Spirit may not be withheld 
10 from me, but that I may promote thy glory, and the salva- 
tion of myself and others: grant this, O Lord, for the 
sake of thy son Jesus Christ. Amen. I 

j 
{On the Day on Which My Dear Mother Was Buried, \ 

Jan, 23, 1759) i 



Almighty God, merciful Father, in whose hands are 
life and death, sanctify unto me the sorrow which I now 

15 feel. Forgive me whatever I have done unkindly to my 
mother, and whatever I have omitted to do kindly. Make 
me to remember her good precepts and good example, 
and to reform my life according to thy holy word, that I 
may lose no more opportunities of good. I am sorrowful, 

20 O Lord; let not my sorrow be without fruit. Let it be 
followed by holy resolutions, and lasting amendment, 
that when I shall die like my mother, I may be received to I 
everlasting life. 

I commend, O Lord, so far as it may be lawful, into 

25 thy hands, the soul of my departed mother, beseeching' 






Prayers 7 1 

Thee to grant her whatever is most beneficial to her in 
her present state. 

O Lord, grant me thy Holy Spirit, and have mercy 
upon me for Jesus Christ's sake. Amen. 



{On Taking Leave of the Thrale Household) 

Almighty God, Father of all mercy, help me by thy 5 
grace, that I may, with humble and sincere thankfulness, 
remember the comforts and conveniences which I have 
enjoyed at this place; and that I may resign them with 
holy submission, equally trusting in thy protection when 
thou givest, and when thou takest away. Have mercy 10 
upon me, O Lord, have mercy upon me. 

To thy fatherly protection, O Lord, I commend this 
family. Bless, guide, and defend them, that they may so 
pass through this world, as finally to enjoy in thy presence 
everlasting happiness, for Jesus Christ's sake, Amen. 15 



{On Receiving the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper j on 
Sunday J December 5^ 1784) 

Almighty and most merciful Father, I am now, as to 
human eyes it seems, about to commemorate, for the last 
time, the death of thy Son Jesus Christ our Savior and 
Redeemer. Grant, O Lord, that my whole hope and 20 
confidence may be in his merits, and thy mercy; enforce 
and accept my imperfect repentance; make this commemo- 
ration available to the confirmation of my faith, the estab- 
lishment of my hope, and the enlargement of my charity; 
and make the death of thy Son Jesus Christ effectual to 2s 
my redemption. Have mercy upon me, and pardon the 



72 Selections from Johnson 

multitude of my offenses. Bless my friends; have mercy 
upon all men. Support me, by the grace of thy Holy 
Spirit, in the days of weakness, and at the hour of death; 
and receive me, at my death, to everlasting happiness, 
for the sake of Jesus Christ. Amen. 



NOTES AND COMMENT 



m 



i 



NOTES AND COMMENT 

Heavy numerals refer to page ; light ones to line. 
Throughout these Notes references to Boswell's Life ofjohftson are 
to the edition by George Birkbeck Hill. 

3, 2-3. Michael Johnson. If Murphy's characterization of 
Michael Johnson is correct, the father and the son were in many 
respects alike: "a man of large athletic make, and violent pas- 
sions ; wrongheaded, positive, and at time afflicted with a degree 
of melancholy, little short of madness." {Johnsonian Miscel- 
lanies, I, 358-9. See also Hill's edition of Boswell's Life of 
Johnson, I, 35.) 

3, 4. Lichfield: a small city about 115 miles northwest of 
London. It has a fine cathedral and many memorials of John- 
son. Johnson declared to Boswell (Boswell's Life of Johnson, 
II, 463) that the inhabitants of Lichfield were "the most sober, 
decent people in England, the genteelest in proportion to their 
wealth, and spoke the purest English." 

3, 5. Midland counties. Consult a map of England. 

3, 8-9. Staffordshire and Worcestershire. Lichfield is in 
Staffordshire; Worcestershire is the adjoining county on the 
south. 

3, 10-14. Between him, etc. Observe that the two points 
made here are slightly elaborated in the next sentence. 

3, 12. Churchman. To enjoy English literature, one ought 
to know something about the organization and terminology of 
the Church of England. On these matters one may consult 
Hugh Elliott's The Church and the State, in the "English 
Citizen Series " ; or Mackower's Constitutional History of the 
Church of England. 

3, 12-13. Qualified himself for municipal office. A good 
deal of English history is concealed behind this brief clause. 
Look up " Test Act " and " Occasional Conformity " in a history 
of England. 

3, 13-14. Sovereigns in possession. By the Revolution of 
1688 James II was forced to yield to William and Mary 

75 



76 



Notes and Comment 



(1689-1702) and to Anne (1702-1714). The Jacobites (the 
Latin Jacobus ^ James) were those who disbelieved in the 
Revolution of 1688 and remained loyal to James II and his 
descendants. Look up the details of the period in any general 
history of England. 

4, 11. Royal touch. The disease of the skin now called 
scrofula was in Johnson's day still known as " the king's evil," 
and was believed to be curable by the royal touch. 

4, 29-30. Read what was interesting. See Boswell's Life 
of Johnson, I, 428: "I would not advise a rigid adherence to a 
particular plan of study. I myself have never persisted in any 
plan for two days together. A man ought to read just as in- 
clination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him 
little good. A young man should read fiwt hours in a day, and 
so may acquire a great deal of knowledge." Macaulay and 
Johnson were not unlike on this point. What are the dis- 
advantages of such reading as is here advised? Do they 
appear in Macaulay's work? In Johnson's? 

5, I. The masters of Attic poetry and eloquence. Who 
are these masters and what did they write? Begin by looking up 
"Attic" in the dictionary. Then consult the best available books 
of reference upon the history of Greek literature. This will 
lead you to the names of the writers you seek and the subjects 
of their tragedies and orations. 

5, 5. That Augustan delicacy of taste, etc. Here again 
Macaulay and Johnson were alike. Macaulay, so his biographer 
tells us, particularly objected to that most delicate and persistent 
drill in Latin verse composition which in the English public 
schools and universities used to be one of the chief tests of 
polished scholarship. 

5, 9. Sixth form at Eton. Of the English public schools 
one of the most famous is Eton, at Windsor, near London. The 
" sixth form " is the senior class. Two excellent stories of Eng- 
lish public school life are Tom Bro^m at Rugby by Thomas 
Hughes, and The Hill by H. A. Vachell. The latter is a story 
of Harrow. 

5, 10. Restorers of learning. Look up ''Renaissance" (or 
** Renascence ") in the encyclopedia. 

5, 12. Petrarch: Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374). an Italian 
humanist of the fourteenth century, famous for his scholar- 
ship and for his writings in both Latin and Italian. From 



i 



Notes and Comment 77 

Robinson and Rolfe's edition of Petrarch's letters one can get, 
in English, an excellent idea of the spirit of the great " re- 
storers of learning." 

5, 18. While he was thus irregularly educating himself, 
etc. Compare Macaulay's own life at the time of his father's 
failure. The circumstances are similar. 

5, 24-25. Either university. In Johnson's time Oxford and 
Cambridge, both ancient even then, were the only universities 
in England. 

5, 27. Pembroke College. The universities of Oxford and 
Cambridge are each made up of a score or more of separate 
colleges, each with its chapel, dining-hall, library, master, 
tutors, etc. Pembroke College, founded in 1624, preserves sev- 
eral memorials of Johnson, among them the desk upon which he 
wrote the Dictionary. 

5, 34. Macrobius. Look him up in a classical dictionary 
so that you can get the connection with the sentences on page 
5, lines 2 ff. 

6, 2. Equal attainments. Johnson had spent the two years 
before college in reading, " not voyages and travels, but all 
literature. Sir, all ancient writers, all manly: though but little 
Greek, only some Anacreon and Hesiod ; but in this irregular 
manner (added he) I had looked into a great many books, 
which were not commonly known at the university, where they 
seldom read any books but what- are put into their hands by their 
tutors ; so that when I came to Oxford, Dr. Adams, now master 
of Pembroke College, told me I was the best qualified for the 
university that he had ever known come there." (BoswelTs 
Life of Johnson, I, 57.) 

6, 3-4. About three years. Dr. George Birkbeck Hill {Dr. 
Johnson: His Friends and His Critics, x^ppendix) has shown 
that Johnson remained at Oxford " barely fourteen months." 

6, 7. Christ Church . . . that aristocratical society. 
Christ Church was, and is, one of the most aristocratic of 
Oxford colleges. 

6, 9. Shoes ... a new pair. Carlyle has something 
to say about this in his chapter on '' The Hero as Man of 
Letters" in Heroes and Hero-JVorship. 

6, 12. Gentleman commoner. Readers of Tom Bro^-n at 
Oxford will remember Hardy, the pensioner, who, partly through 
Tom's efforts, won his way into the respect of his college by 



78 



Notes and Comment 



proving to be such an admirable oarsman, scholar, and gentle- 
man. The reason that Hardy's lot was so hard was that natural, 
democratic relations in the college were at that time rendered 
impossible by the gentleman-commoners, who patronized nearly 
all whom they did not ignore. 

6, 14. Gross disrespect. To say that Johnson's conduct was 
the height of disrespect and that " in every mutiny " he was a 
leader is to distort the evidence. Here, as often, Macaulay 
seems to find the mere facts not striking enough. The student 
should be constantly on his guard against this fault, and 
should allow for it exactly as he would if he knew his watch 
to be in the habit of gaining a little time each day. 

6, 14-15. Generally to be seen, etc.: exaggerated from Bos- 
well's report (I, 74) furnished by the Bishop of Dromore: "I 
have heard from some of his contemporaries that he was gen- 
erally seen lounging at the college gate, with a circle of young 
students round him, whom he was entertaining with wit, and 
keeping from their studies, if not spiriting them up to rebellion 
against the college discipline, which in his mature years he so 
much extolled." 

6, 1 6. Effigy. What is the derivation of this word? What 
does it mean here? Has it ever another meaning? 

6, 25. Read with pleasure by Pope himself. Pope is said 
to have returned the poem to Arbuthnot with the remark: ''The 
writer of this poem will lea^ve it a question for posterity 
whether his or mine be the original." — Johnsonian Miscel- 
lanies , I, 370, note 5. 

6, 32. In the autumn of 1731. Although Johnson's name 
remained on the college books until the autumn of 1731, he 
seems not to have been in continuous residence after December, 

1729- 

7, 7. Aggravation. Note the precise application of a word 
which is frequently used inaccurately. 

7, 18 ff. Would. A report that Johnson once did a thing is 
to Macaulay sufficient ground for representing it as habitual. 

8, 20. Hervey. See page ir, lines 24 ff. 

8, 22. Gilbert Walmesley. See page 42, line 28, and the note 
thereon. 

8, 29. Usher: "an under-teacher; one who introduces young 
scholars to higher learning." — Johnson's Dictionary. 

8, 33-34. Birmingham . . . literary drudgery. Birming- 



\ 



Notes and Comment 79 

ham, now a great manufacturing city, is not far from Lichfield. 
Johnson's work there was hack writing for a Mr. Warren, a 
bookseller and the publisher of the Birmingham Journal. 

9, 2. A Latin book about Abyssinia. " Having mentioned 
that he had read at Pembroke College a Voyage to Abyssinia, 
by Lobo, a Portuguese Jesuit, ^nd that he thought an abridg- 
ment and translation of it from the French into English might 
be an useful and profitable publication " (Boswell's Life of 
Johnson, I, 86), Johnson was at length prevailed upon to finish 
the work, which was published in 1735. Note that Johnson's 
translation was made from a French version of the original. 

9, 3. Publishing by subscription: pledging in advance pur- 
chases enough to pay for issuing the book. This was common 
at the time. Early editions of eighteenth-century books often 
contain a printed list of the subscribers. 

9, 3. Politian: a Florentine humanist and poet of the fif- 
teenth century, who wrote in both Italian and Latin. Johnson 
spoke of modern writers of Latin poetry as a class of authors 
who, even in his day, were too much neglected. 

9, 8. Fell in love. Rarely are Macaulay's boisterous rhetoric 
and untamable habit of exaggeration more displeasing than 
in his comments upon Johnson's wife. These two paragraphs 
contain many errors. But even if Macaulay had been right 
about the age of Mrs. Johnson's children, about Johnson's pet 
name for his wife, and about her poverty, which he was not, 
nothing could have justified the vulgar phrase "tawdry 
painted grandmother." Carlyle, whose treatment of the mat- 
ter shows insight and sympathy, remarks that " Johnson's death- 
less affection for his Tetty was always venerable and noble." 
Note that Lucy Porter was six years younger than Johnson 
(Boswell's Life of Johnson, II, 462) ; that Mrs. Johnson's 
property apparently amounted to some $4,000 (Boswell's Life 
of Johnson, I, 95n.) ; that Johnson's nickname for her was 
"Tetty" or " Tetsy." 

9, 13-14. Queensberrys and Lepels: noble families promi- 
nent in the world of fashion. 

9, 16. Had seldom or never. In view of Boswell's testimony 
that Johnson had in his early years passed much time in the 
company of ladies remarkable for good breeding, this state- 
ment of Macaulay must be rejected. 

10, 7. Garrick. See Macaulay's third paragraph on page 



8o Notes and Comment 

19. David Garrick (1717-1779) and his brother were John- 
son's first pupils. In 1737, Johnson and Garrick, both very 
poor, went up to London together to try their fortunes in the 
great city. Garrick became the most famous actor of his time. 
Compare the notes on 11, 32-33; 20, 17; and 42, 22-23. 

II, 4. Thomson: James Thomson (1700-1748). His Seasons 
(1726-1730), describing the various scenes and occupations of 
spring, summer, autumn, and winter, is now little read. But 
in its own time it gave much pleasure to those who were be- 
ginning to be fond of rural life and landscape in poetry. Dur- 
ing the period immediately before Thomson, poetry had usually 
dealt with London rather than with the country. . 

II, e-j. Pasquin . . . The Beggar's Opera. Pasguin: 
a Dramatick Satire on the Times (1736) by Henry Fielding 
(1707-1754), had a run of sixty nights. Of the popularity of 
The Beg gar* s Opera (first performed in 1728) by John Gay 
(1685-1732) the writer (probably Pope himself) of a note on 
Pope's Dunciad, HI, 330, observes that ** it was acted in Lon- 
don sixty-three days, uninterrupted ; and renewed the next sea- 
son with equal applause. It spread into all the great towns of 
England, was played in many places to the thirtieth and fortieth 
time, at Bath and Bristol, fifty, etc. It made its progress into 
Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, where it was performed twenty- 
four days together." 

II, 16. Porter's knot: a pad by which the porter eased the 
burden of his load. 

11, 32-33. Drury Lane: a small street in the midst of London. 
Its reputation for respectability was none too good. In 1747, 
when Garrick became joint owner of the Drury Lane Theatre, 
Johnson wrote a famous prologue for the opening. 

12, 8-9. The sight of food, etc. This description is much 
overdrawn. 

12, II. Ordinaries: restaurants. 

12, 25-29. Osborne . . . Harleian Library. The Library 
of Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, was bought by a book- 
seller named Osborne, who engaged Johnson to help make a 
catalogue and prospectus of it. Johnson told Boswell (Bos- 
well's Life of Johnson, I, 154) the "simple truth" of the mat- 
ter as follows: *' Sir, he was impertinent to me, and I beat him. 
But it was not in his shop: it was in my own chamber." 

12, 32. Cave. Edward Cave (1691-1754) is chiefly remem- 



Notes and Comment 8i 

befed as the founder of the Gentleman's Magazine. He was 
also proprietor of the Rambler. Johnson had a generous re- 
gard for Cave but admitted that he was " a penurious pay- 
master." 

13, 9 ff. Blefuscu, Mildendo, etc. These words should be 
looked up in Swift's Gulliver. 

13, 19. One form of government, etc. Sir Adam Ferguson 
suggested to Dr. Johnson (Boswell's Life of Johnson, II, 170) 
ji " that luxury corrupts a people, and destroys the spirit of liberty. 
ii Johnson. ' Sir, that is all visionary. I would not give half a 
I guinea to live under one form of government rather than an- 
) other. It is of no moment to the happiness of an individual, 
i Sir, the danger of the abuse of power is nothing to a private 
man. What Frenchman is prevented from passing his life as 
he pleases ? ' Sir Adam. ' But, Sir, in the British constitution it 
is surely of importance to keep up a spirit in the people, so as 
to preserve a balance against the crown.' Johnson. ' Sir, I per- 
ceive you are a vile Whig. Why all this childish jealousy of 
the power of the crown? The crown has not power enough. 
When I say that all governments are alike, I consider that in 
no government power can be abused long. Mankind will not 
bear it. If a sovereign oppresses his people to a great degree, 
they will rise and cut off his head. There is a remedy in human 
nature against tyranny, that will keep us safe under every form 
of government.' " 

Does this opinion justify Macaulay's statement? 

13, 21. Capulets — Montagues: the rival houses in Shake- 
speare's Romeo and Juliet. 

13, 22. Blues — Greens: spectators at Roman chariot-races 
divided into parties named from the colors of the rival 
charioteers. These parties sometimes carried to outrageous 
extremes their hostility to the opposing factions. (See Gib- 
bon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chap. 40, Sec- 
tion 2.) 

13, 27. Sacheverell: a famous Tory preacher. At the time 
referred to, the Whigs had, very unwisely, just driven 
Sacheverell from his London pulpit. Popular feeling, espe- 
cially in the country, warmly supported Sacheverell, whose 
appearance at Lichfield was probably — as it certainly was else- 
where — the occasion for a kind of excitement which might 
easily have had some effect upon even a child of three. 



82 Notes and Comment 

14, 2. Tom Tempest: a character in the Idler, No. 10. He 
is a rabid Jacobite. 

14, 3. Laud, a poor creature, etc.: a peevish and ridiculously 
exaggerated estimate. Archbishop Laud's greatest faults were 
that he had an inordinate sense of the necessity of outward 
uniformity in the conduct of church matters, and that he relied 
upon force rather than persuasion to attain his ends. But 
Macaulay's words give no idea of Laud's energy, fearlessness, 
and executive capacity. 

14, 3-9. Laud, Hampden. Observe that Macaulay is sup- 
posed to be proving that Johnson held these opinions when he 
first came to London, in 1737. Yet some of the evidence cited 
is of a much later date: the reference to Laud is from The 
Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) ; the reference to Hampden 
is from the Life of Waller (1778). 

14, 7. Hampden. The statesman John Hampden {1594- 
1643) is best known for his resistance against the tax for ship 
money. Macaulay's essay on Hampden is one of his most 
spirited and whole-hearted pieces. 

14, 10. Falkland — Clarendon. These men are cited by 
Macaulay in order to show that the tax for ship-money was 
disapproved even by Royalists. Look up Falkland and Claren- 
don (Lucius Cary and Edward Hyde) and see if they were 
Royalists at the time of the ship-money question. What bear- 
ing has this on Macaulay's use of their names in this passage? j 

14, lo-ii. Roundhead: " a Puritan, so named from the prac- 
tice once prevalent among them of cropping their hair round." | 
(Johnson's Dictionary.) 

14, 19-20. Pilloried. If you look up William Prynne or 
Daniel Defoe in a biographical dictionary, you will see how 
they were punished for some of their writings. 

14, 22-23. Dissenters, stock-jobbers, etc.: men and measures / 
associated — by their enemies, at least — with the Whig party. [ 
Look up " dissenter " in the dictionary. 

14, 24. Aversion to the Scotch. In Hill's edition of Bos 
well the many references to Scotland and the Scotch are col- * 
lected in the admirable index. Johnson admitted that " much \ 
may be made of a Scotchman, if he be caught young." (Bos- 
well's Life of Johnson, II, 194.) One of the most famous defini- 
tions in Johnson's Dictionary is " Oats. — A grain which in Eng- 
land is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the 



! 

! 



„ Notes and Comment 8^ 

i 

people." Of course many of Johnson's flings at Scotland were 
merely intended to stir up Boswell. Here, as always, we must 
distinguish between Johnson's whims and his deliberate judg- 
ij ments. Johnson spoke the truth when he said of himself 
•J (Boswell's Life of Johnson, IV, 239): ''I sometimes say more 
j than I mean, in jest; and people are apt to believe me 
I serious." 

\ 14, 29-30. Judgment so disordered. But Johnson, when he 
g was pronouncing serious judgments, showed a deep love of 
i justice, which party prejudice rarely overcame. 

14, 32. Johnson . . . owned. The passage (Murphy's Life 
of Johnson, p. 45) is worth quoting. "That Johnson was the 
author of the debates during that period was not generally 
known; but the secret transpired several years afterwards, and 
was avowed by himself on the following occasion. Mr. Wed- 
derburne (now Lord Loughborough), Dr. Johnson, Dr. Francis 
(the translator of Horace), the present writer, and others, dined 
with the late Mr. Foote. An important debate towards the 
end of Sir Robert Walpole's administration being mentioned. 
Dr. Francis observed, ' That Mr. Pitt's speech, on that occa- 
sion, was the best he had ever read.' He added, ' That he 
had employed eight years of his life in the study of Demos- 
thenes, and finished a translation of the celebrated orator, with 
all the decorations of style and language within the reach of 
his capacity; but he had met with nothing equal to the speech 
above mentioned.' Many of the company remembered the de- 
bate; and some passages were cited, with the approbation and 
applause of all present. During the ardor of conversation 
Johnson remained silent. As soon as the warmth of praise sub- 
sided, he opened with these words: 'That speech I wrote in a 
garret in Exeter-street.' The company was struck with aston- 
ishment. Dr. Francis asked, ' How that speech could be w^rit- 
ten by him?' * Sir,' said Johnson, 'I wrote it in Exeter-street. 
I never had been in the gallery of the House of Commons but 
once. Cave had interest with the door-keepers. He, and the 
persons employed under him, gained admittance ; they brought 
away the subject of discussion, the names of the speakers, the 
side they took, and the order in which they rose, together with 
notes of the arguments advanced in the course of the debate. 
The whole was afterwards communicated to me, and I composed 
the speeches in the form which they now have in the Parlia- 



84 Notes and Comment 

mentary debates.' To this discovery Dr. Francis made an- 
swer: 'Then, Sir, you have exceeded Demosthenes himself; 
for to say, that you have exceeded Francis's Demosthenes, 
would be saying nothing.' The rest of the company bestowed 
lavish encomiums on Johnson: one, in particular, praised his 
impartiality; observing, that he dealt out reason and eloquence 
with an equal hand to both parties. ' That is not quite true,* 
said Johnson; 'I saved appearances tolerably well; but I took 
care that the WHIG DOGS should not have the best of it." 
(Hill's Johnsonian Miscellanies, I, 378-9.) 

I5> 15-19- Juvenal — Horace. The contrast which Macaulay 
wishes to draw between the two great Roman satirists is, briefly, 
to represent Horace as hitting off the foibles of men in urbane, 
highly polished verse, while Juvenal reproves them sternly and 
indignantly. Horace was an observer of mankind; Juvenal was 
a reformer. 

16, 9. Boyse: Samuel Boyse (i 708-1 749), after an unsuccess- 
ful career as a verse-writer for magazines, died in poverty. ) 
Johnson said of him that " he had no power of maintaining 
the dignity of wit, and though his understanding was very ex- 
tensive, yet but a few could discover that he had any genius \ 
above the common rank." 

16, 18. Psalmanazar. George Psalmanazar (even his name 1 
is a fabrication) was a Frenchman who pretended to be a 
native of Formosa, invented a Formosan language, duped the 
Royal Society, was desired by dignitaries of the church to 
*' teach the Formosan language to a set of gentlemen, who were 
afterwards to go with him to convert these people to Chris- 1 
tianity," published (1704) An Historical and Geographical | 
Description of Formosa, and finally repented and confessed his ; 
deception. He must have been a very remarkable man, for ' 
Johnson once said that he w^ould as soon have thought of con- \ 
tradicting a bishop as of contradicting Psalmanazar. 

16, 23. Richard Savage. Richard Savage (1698-1743), if 
remembered at all nowadays, is kept alive not by his poetry but ; 
by his friendship with Johnson and by Johnson's biography of 
him. 

16, 25-26. Blue ribands — Saint James's Square: people of 
rank and wealth. The blue ribbon was a badge of the 
Order of the Garter; St. James's Square was one of the most 
fashionable parts of London. 



Notes and Comment 85 



16, 27. Newgate: the famous London prison. In the eight- 
eenth century the treatment of crime was barbarous in the 
extreme. Minor offenses (such as petty larceny) were punished 
by death, executions were public shows, and prisons were dirty 
and unnecessarily degrading. 

17, 4. Piazza of Covent Garden: Covent [i.e.. Convent] 
Garden is the square in which the Market now stands. In 
Johnson's time the Piazza was the arcade on the north and 
east sides. A picture of Covent Garden in the eighteenth cen- 
tury, showing the '' piazza," is to be found in Sir Walter 
Besant's London in the Eighteenth Century, page 115. 

17, II. Opposition: the political party not in power; that is, 
not holding a majority in the Ministry and in Parliament. 

17, 24. Grub Street. Johnson's own definition (in his Dic- 
tionary) is: "Originally the name of a street in Moorfields in 
London, much inhabited by writers of small histories, dic- 
tionaries, and temporary poems; whence any mean production 
is called gruhstreet." 

18, 3. Warburton: William Warburton (1698-1779), Bishop 
of Gloucester, mainly known as a theological scholar, was also, 
like Johnson, an editor of Shakespeare. Johnson and Warburton 
had the highest respect for the scholarship and critical ability 
of each other. 

18, 7. Dictionary. To compile a dictionary unaided is a 
stupendous task. The dictionaries of our own day (see the 
preface to Webster's) are made by a fairly large group of 
men, each of whom is responsible for only a limited field. But 
Johnson, with merely clerical assistance and such help as he 
could get from the rather inadequate dictionaries that had 
already been made, worked out etymologies, framed definitions, 
and collected and selected illustrative passages. 

18, 13. Chesterfield: the Earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773) is 
chiefly known for his Letters to his Son. They are interesting 
as one of the most detailed conduct-books of the eighteenth 
century. Much of the advice is still valuable, in spite of well- 
founded objections to Chesterfield's occasional tendency to 
confuse conduct with manners. 

18, 22 ff. By no means desirous. The remainder of the 
sentence is exaggerated, even for Macaulay. 

19, I. Huge Volumes. The Dictionary is in two ver^^ large 
and very thick folios. 



86 Notes and Comment 

19, 9-10. Couplets in which the fall of Wolsey is de- 
scribed. The passage (lines 99-120 of The Vanity of Human 
Wishes) is as follows: 

" In full-blown dignity see Wolsey stand, 
Law in his voice, and fortune in his hand; 
To him the church, the realm, their powers consign, 
Through him the rays of regal bounty shine, 
Turn'd by his nod the stream of honor flows, 
His smile alone security bestows: 
Still to new heights his restless wishes tow'r, 
Claim leads to claim, and pow'r advances pow'r; 
Till conquest unresisted ceas'd to please, 
And rights submitted left him none to seize. 
At length his sov'reign frowns — the train of state 
Mark the keen glance, and watch the sign to hate. 
Wher'er he turns, he meets a stranger's eye, 
His suppliants scorn him, and his followers fly; 
Now drops at once the pride of awful state, 
The golden canopy, the glitt'ring plate. 
The regal palace, the luxurious board. 
The liv'ried army, and the menial lord. 
With age, with cares, with maladies oppressed, 
He seeks the refuge of monastic rest. 
Grief aids disease, remember'd folly stings. 
And his last sighs reproach the faith of Kings.'* 

19, II. The wonderful lines: in the original, lines 56 ff. 
Dryden's translation (lines 87 ff.) runs: 

"Down go the titles; and the statue crown'd 
Is by base hands in the next river drown'd. 
The guiltless horses, and the chariot wheel. 
The same effects of vulgar fury feel: 
The smith prepares his hammer for the stroke, 
While the lung'd bellows hissing fire provoke; 
Sejanus, almost first of Roman names. 
The great Sejanus crackles in the flames: 

Adorn your doors with laurels; and a bull, 
Milk-white, and large, lead to the Capitol; 



Notes and Comment 87 

Sejanus with a rope is dragg'd along, 

The sport and laughter of the giddy throng! 



When the King's trump, the mob are for the King: 
They follow Fortune, and the common cry 
Is still against the rogue condemn'd to die." 

19, 18. In the concluding passage. But the independent 
student will wish to judge for himself. Of course Macaulay 
is throughout this paragraph speaking of the power of Juvenal 
in the original Latin. In translations the effect is somewhat 
weakened. Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes will be found in 
Osgood's Selections from Johnson. 

19, 31. Goodman's Fields. Garrick made this theater so 
successful that Gray, who was himself unconvinced of Garrick's 
genius, writes to a correspondent: "Did I tell you about Mr. 
Garrick, that the town is horn-mad after him? There are 
a dozen dukes of a night at Goodman's Fields sometimes." 

20, 7. Johnson saw with . . . envy, etc. The Rambler, 
No. 200, contains a character of Prospero (i.e., the successful 
man), which is supposed to be intended for Garrick. Pros- 
pero is represented as " a man lately raised to wealth by a 
lucky project, and too much intoxicated by sudden elevation, or 
too little polished by thought and conversation, to enjoy his 
present fortune with elegance and decency." At Prospero's 
success Johnson declares that he felt " an honest and disinterested 
joy." Formerly Johnson and Prospero, who had " set out in 
the world together," had " for a long time mutually assisted 
each other in [their] exigencies, as either happened to have 
money or influence beyond his immediate necessities." But now 
Prospero has a fine house and makes his old friend feel the 
" insolence of condescension." Prospero's best breakfast room is 
not for him, nor his best furniture, nor his best china. The 
visitor was even given the second-best tea, which must par- 
ticularly have angered him. "Breakfast was at last set; and 
as I was not willing to indulge the peevishness that began to 
seize me, I commended the tea. Prospero then told me, that 
another time I should taste his finest sort, but that he had only a 
very small quantity remaining, and reserved it for those whom 
he thought himself obliged to treat with particular respect." 



88 Notes and Comment 

*' At length," says the writer, '' I left him without any intention 
of seeing him again, unless some misfortune should restore 
his understanding." 

If Garrick knew that he was intended in this severe satire 
upon selfishness and ingratitude, it would seem that, if he really 
w^ere at all like Prospero, he would have completely w^ithdrawn 
his acquaintance from Johnson. Furthermore the paper seems 
strangely at variance with that delightful page in Boswell's 
Life of Johnson (Hill's edition. III, 263-4), where Johnson not 
only admits that Garrick is a liberal man and that he has 
'' advanced the dignity of his profession," but whimsically 
asserts: "If all this [i.e., Garrick's fame and wealth] had hap- 
pened to me, I should have had a couple of fellows with long 
poles walking before me, to knock down everybody that stood 
in the way." 

20, 17. Sympathized with each other on so many points. 
Boswell {Life of Johnson, III, 70), in chronicling the memorable 
occasion w^hen Johnson met Wilkes, remarks that Johnson w^ould 
let nobody attack Garrick but himself. See Johnson's famous 
tribute to Garrick quoted in the note on Walmesley (p. 42, lines 
22-23). 

20, 23. Irene. The plot of Irene (acted in 1749), though 
eventful, is very simple. Mahomet the Great, Emperor of the 
Turks, falls in love with Irene, a beautiful Greek captive, and 
asks her to share his kingdom. For a time she refuses, but 
presently consents. Meanwhile, however, a conspiracy against 
the life of the emperor has been unearthed and one of the con- 
spirators has, under torture, falsely accused Irene of being im- 
plicated in the plot. Irene is put to death before the emperor 
discovers that she is innocent. 

Of the few who nowadays read Irene most would probably 
agree with Garrick's adaptation of Johnson's own line: "When 
Johnson w^rites tragedy," said Garrick, " declamation roars, 
and passion sleeps." 

20, 23. Alterations. On Johnson's resentment of these altera- 
tions, and on the limited success of Irene, see Boswell's Life 
of Johnson, I, 196-7. 

20, 29. Closet. Nowadays a closet is usually unlighted and 
is the last place in which one w^ould choose to read. What 
meaning, then, do you attach to the word here? 

20, 31. Blank verse. Is there in this fact anything char- 



Notes and Comment 89 

acteristic of Johnson's general feeling in regard to poetry? In 
what meter did most of Johnson's favorite poets write? 

20, 31. A change in the last syllable. Try this for yourself 
by looking up both poems and trying to turn a few lines of 
either one into the meter of the other. 

21, lo-ii. The Lay Monastery, etc. Of these periodicals 
the Lay Monastery is most closely patterned after the Spectator; 
the Free Thinker is perhaps the best. For a list of similar 
periodicals, with notes and criticisms on them, consult Nathan 
Drake's Essays . . . illustrative of the Rambler, Adventurer, 
and Idler, Vol. II, or the catalogue of the Hope Collection in 
the Bodleian Library at Oxford. 

21, 22. Richardson. Samuel Richardson's long and minute 
novels {Clarissa Harlowe is the longest and most famous) were 
much read and wept over in Johnson's day. Johnson has very 
accurately estimated both Richardson's strength and his weak- 
ness. Look up the various passages in Boswell's Life of Johnson 
and put them together. 

21, 24. Young: Edward Young (1683-1765). His poetry was 
somewhat in the manner of Pope, though more solemn and less 
elaborately finished. His Night Thoughts (1742-45) is his 
most famous work. For this somber poem Johnson had a great 
admiration. " Johnson was pleased when told of the minute 
attention with which Young had signified his approbation of his 
Essays" (Boswell's Life of Johnson, I, 215.) 

21, 24. Hartley: David Hartley (1705-1757), the philosopher. 

21, 25. Bubb Dodington. George Bubb Dodington, Baron 
Melcombe (1691-1762), though corrupt enough both as regards 
his private life and his political connections, was a notable 
patron of literature. Young, Thomson, Fielding, and others, 
addressed dedications to him, — a proceeding which at the time 
usually implied money or an appointment in return. 

21, 30-33. Prince Frederic, Leicester House. The Prince 
of Wales died in 1751. George II, who lived until 1760, was 
therefore succeeded by his grandson. Leicester House, in 
Leicester Square, was then the London residence of the Prince 
of Wales. 

22, 27-32. Sir Roger, etc. Sir Roger appears in some fifty 
Spectator papers (see any of the school editions) ; Sir Roger's 
chaplain is mentioned in Nos. 106, 112, and elsewhere; the butler 
in Nos. 106 and 517; Will Wimble in No. 108; Will 



90 Notes and Comment 

Honeycomb in Nos. 2, 41, 77, 251, 409, 511, 530, and else- 
where; the Vision of Mirza is No. 159, the Citizen's Journal, 
No. 183; the Everlasting Club, No. 72; the Dunmow Flitch, Nos. 
607 and 608; Hilpah and Shalum, Nos. 584 and 585; the Visit 
to the Exchange, No. 69 ; Sir Roger's Visit to Westminster Abbey, 
No. 329. It will be observed that Macaulay names only papers 
by Addison. Look up Macaulay's essay on Addison and see 
what he thought of Addison's contributions as compared with 
those of Steele. Then read some of Steele's papers and ask 
yourself if Macaulay is wholly justified in his opinion. 

22, 34 ff. Squire Bluster, etc. These characters appear, re- 
spectively in Numbers 142, 138, 82, 126, 22, 161, and 186 of the 
Rambler. 

23, 14. The Gunnings. The Gunning sisters were so beau- 
tiful that their appearance upon the street or in a drawing- 
room caused an actual commotion. 

23, 15. Lady Mary: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689- 
1762), a woman of great intelligence and spirit, as well as of 
extraordinary wit. Her Letters are still delightful. 

23, 17. Monthly Review: established in 1749 by Ralph Grif- 
fiths. Goldsmith wrote for it at one time. In 1767 Johnson 
told the king that the Monthly Reviezu was more careful thati 
the Critical Re'vienv, although less firm in its support of the 
church. (Boswell's Life of Johnson, II, 40.) Again (III, 32) 
he told Boswell that the critics of the Monthly Revie^i.v read their 
books through because they were not fertile enough to " lay 
hold of the topic, and write chiefly from their own minds " as 
did the writers for the Critical Remeiv. 

23, 23-24. Set himself . . . doggedly to work. Johnson de- 
clared, though not on this occasion, that " a man may write at 
any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it." (Boswell's 
Life of Johnson, V, 40.) 

24, 2. Two successive numbers of the World: numbers 
100 and loi, Nov. 28 and Dec. 5, 1754. The passage par- 
ticularly alluded to (No. 100) points out the lack of a standard 
for the English language, which is indeed, says the writer, in a 
state of anarchy. He then goes on: "The time for discrimina- 
tion seems to be now come. Toleration, adoption, and natural- 
ization have run their lengths. Good order and authority are 
now necessary. But where shall we find them, and at the same 
time, the obedience due to them? We must have recourse to th^l 



Notes and Comment 91 

old Roman expedient In times of confusion, and choose a dictator. 
I Upon this principle I give my vote for Mr. Johnson to fill 
that great and arduous post. And I hereby declare that I 
make a total surrender of all my rights and privileges in the 
English language, as a free-born British subject, to the said 
Mr. Johnson, during the term of his dictatorship. Nay more; 
I w^ill not only obey him, like an old Roman, as my dictator, 
but, like a modern Roman, I v^ill implicitly believe in him 
as my pope, and hold him to be infallible while in the chair; 
but not longer. More than this he cannot vs^ell require; for I 
presume that obedience can never be expected w^hen there is 
neither terror to enforce, nor interest to invite it." One should 
read these two papers through in order to understand the feeling 
which they must have aroused in Johnson. In the second of 
these two papers Chesterfield expresses " a greater opinion of 
his [Johnson's] impartiality and severity as a judge, than of his 
gallantry as a fine gentleman." 

24, 20. Home Tooke. John Home Tooke (1736-1812) was 
a politician and philologist. His Diversions of Purley (1786 ff.) 
revealed him as far surpassing Johnson in his knowledge of 
those Teutonic languages that bear upon English etymology. 
Tooke, however, had great respect for Johnson's genius and 
was much gratified to hear that Johnson had said (Boswell's 
Life of Johnson, IH, 354) that if he were to make a new 
edition of the Dictionary he should adopt several of Tooke's 
etymologies. 

25, 4. Junius and Skinner. Johnson fully acknowledged his 
dependence upon the earlier etymological dictionaries of Francis 
Junius and Stephen Skinner. Johnson thought that " Junius 
appears to have excelled in extent of learning, and Skinner in 
rectitude of understanding." 

25, 11-12. Spunging-houses. Johnson himself defines " spung- 
ing-house " in his Dictionary as " a house to which debtors are 
taken before commitment to prison, where the bailiffs sponge 
upon them, or riot at their cost." 

25, 24. The very best thing that he ever wrote. Soame 
Jenyns (1704-1787) was very fairly characterized by Boswell 
{Life of Johnson, I, 315): ''Jenyns was possessed of lively 
talents, and a style eminently pure and easy, and could very 
happily play with a light subject, either in prose or verse; but 
when he ventured on that most difficult and excruciating ques- 



92 Notes and Comment 

tion, the Origin of Evil, he ' ventured far beyond his depth,' 
and, accordingly, was exposed by Johnson, both with acute 
argument and brilliant wit." 

26, 10. Rasselas. Johnson's Rasselas (1759) must be read 
as a series of essays rather than as a romance. That the scene 
and characters are remote from England means little: Johnson, 
like many eighteenth-century writers, w^as fond of giving advice 
to his countrymen by dressing his ideas in foreign costume. 
Look at Goldsmith's Citizen of the World or Addison's Spec- 
tator, No. 50, and notice how those authors contrive to hint 
that Englishmen still had much to learn. (See the extract from 
Rasselas on pages 63 ff. of this volume.) 

26, 12. Miss Lydia Languish. Lydia Languish, although 
she is less famous than Mrs. Malaprop, is worth knowing. Like 
Mrs. Malaprop, she appears in Sheridan's comedy The Rivals 
(1775). Her weakness is her delight in romantic novels. 

27, II. Bruce's Travels. Johnson can hardly be blamed for 
not having read Bruce's Travels, for they did not appear 
until after his death. Macaulay's criticism upon Rasselas in this 
paragraph betrays ignorance of the attitude of most eighteenth- 
century English writers toward the East, which they used 
chiefly as a point of view. 

27, 16. Mrs. Lennox. Charlotte Lennox (1720-1804) was 
born in New York but lived in England nearly all of her life. 
Her Female Quixote, a satirical novel, was popular, and her 
Shakespeare Illustrated was preceded by a dedication from the 
hand of Johnson, who once gave a dinner in her honor, at 
which he crowned her with laurel. It is reported that on this 
occasion " Johnson's face shone with meridian splendor, though 
his drink had been only lemonade." (Boswell's Life of Johnson, 
I, 255 n.) 

27, 16. Mrs. Sheridan: mother of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. 
She wrote novels and plays. Johnson said to her, concerning 
the distressful happenings of her most famous novel, *' I know 
not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to 
make your readers sufiFer so much." (Boswell's Life of John- 
son, I, 390.) 

27, 29. Had little right to blame. The iniplication is 
misleading: Johnson does, to be sure, note the anachronisms 
mentioned by Macaulay, but characterizes such objections as 
Macaulay here ascribes to him as "the petty cavils of petty 



Notes and Comment 93 

minds." As to the anachronisms themselves, the first occurs in 
Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, II, ii ; the second in A 
Winter's Tale, V, ii. Both Aristotle and Julio Romano lived 
much too late for Shakespeare's purpose. 

28, 5-6. Reflections on Whig party. The definitions in 
question are as follows: ''Whig: The name of a faction"; 
"Excise: A hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged 
not by the common judges of property, but by wretches hired 
by those to whom excise is paid"; "Pension: An allowance 
made to any one without an equivalent. In England it is 
generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for 
treason to his country"; "Pensioner: One who is supported by 
an allowance paid at the will of another; a dependent." The 
incident concerning the word Renegade (or Renegado) is thus 
reported by Johnson: "When I came to the word Renegado, 
after telling that it meant ' one who deserts to the enemy, a 
revolter,' I added, Sometimes ive say a Gower. Thus it went 
to the press; but the printer had more wit than I, and struck 
it out." (Boswell's Life of Johnson, I, 296.) 

Is " coarse " the appropriate word to describe Johnson's 
definition of excise? 

28, II. Lord Privy Seal. He had charge of the "privy 
seal," which is the lesser seal for state papers. The " great 
seal " was in charge of the Lord Keeper. 

28, 17-18. Had ascended the throne. In what year? 

28, 20-22. The city, etc. : that is, London feeling was mainly 
Whig; Oxford, Tory. The Cavendishes and Bentincks were 
prominent Whig families ; the Somersets and Wyndhams were 
Tories. 

28, 23. To kiss hands: not each other's hands, but the hand 
of the king, as a token of submission to his service. 

28, 24. Lord Bute. John Stuart (1713-1792), third Earl of 
Bute, became George Ill's prime minister in 1762. 

28, 28. Pension. To an American the word " pension " sug- 
gests a reward for military service. In England, however, 
pensions are granted for civil service in public office, and even 
for the service which a man renders to the nation by achieving 
distinction in any worthy career. In his Dictionary Johnson had 
given definitions (see the note on 28, 5-6) which made him doubt 
whether he ought to receive the bounty of his sovereign. But 
Johnson's scruples were overcome by the advice of his friends, 



94 Notes and Comment 

and by the tact of Lord Bute, who assured Johnson that the pen- 
sion was offered not for anything he might do in the future 
but for that which he had done in the past. 

29, 29-30. Ghost . . . Cock Lane. Here again Macaulay 
misrepresents Johnson, whose attitude in the matter of the fa- 
mous Cock Lane Ghost was by no means weakly credulous. The 
incident is discussed at length by Boswell {Life of Johnson, I, 
406-7), who assures us that ''Johnson was one of those by whom 
the imposture was detected." 

30, 3. Churchill: Charles Churchill (1731-1764), author of 
many violent satires in verse, produced in 1762-1763 The Ghost, 
a satire in four books. In the second book he draws Johnson as 

" Pomposo, insolent and loud, 
Vain idol of a scribbling crowd, 
Whose very name inspires an awe. 
Whose ev'ry word is Sense and Law, 
For what his Greatness hath decreed. 
Like Laws of Persia and of Mede, 
Sacred thro' all the realm of tVit, 
Must never of Repeal admit; 



Who, to increase his native strength. 
Draws words six syllables in length, 
With which, assisted with a frown 
By way of Club, he knocks us down." 

In the third book Churchill again introduces Johnson and 
sneers at his delay in producing his Shakespeare: 

" He for Subscribers baits his hook. 
And takes their cash — but where's the Book?" 

30, 19-20. The note on the character of Polonius is as follows: 
" Polonius is a man bred in courts, exercised in business, 
stored with observation, confident of his knowledge, proud of his 
eloquence, and declining to dotage. His mode of oratory is 
truly represented as designed to ridicule the practice of those 
times, of prefaces that made no introduction, and of method 
that embarrassed rather than explained. This part of his char- 
acter is accidental, the rest is natural. Such a man is positive 



Notes and Comment 95 

and confident, because he knows that his mind was once strong, 
and knows not that it has become weak. Such a man excels in 
general principles, but fails in the particular application. He 
is knowing in retrospect, and ignorant in foresight. While he 
depends upon his memory, and can draw from his repositories 
of knowledge, he utters weighty sentences, and gives useful 
counsel ; but as the mind in its enfeebled state cannot be kept 
long busy and intent, the old man is subject to sudden derelic- 
tion of his faculties, he loses the order of his ideas, and entangles 
himself in his own thoughts, till he recovers the leading prin- 
ciple, and falls again into his former train. The idea of dotage 
encroaching upon wisdom, will solve all the phenomena of the 
character of Polonius." 

30, 21-22. Wilhelm Meister's admirable examination of 
Hamlet. Try to look this up either in a copy of Carlyle's 
translation of Goethe's JFilhelm Meister, or in Rolfe's edition of 
Hamlet. Macaulay, lamenting his own lack of critical insight, 
said that this passage from Goethe raised in him admiration 
and despair. 

30, 22 ff. It would be difficult, etc. Much more favorable, 
and much more authoritative, is the opinion of Sir Sidney Lee 
{Life of JVilUam Shakespeare, ed. 1909, page 334) that al- 
though Johnson's text and notes leave much to be desired, yet, 
" in his preface and elsewhere he displays a genuine, if occa- 
sionally sluggish sense of Shakespeare's greatness, and his mas- 
sive sagacitv' enabled him to indicate convincingly Shakespeare's 
triumphs of characterization." 

31, 6. Ben: Ben Jonson. Find out enough about him to keep 
him distinct from Samuel Johnson. 

31, 13 ff. -ffischylus, etc. Why is this case a parallel to that 
of the English dramatists (mentioned just below) in reference to 
Shakespeare? 

31, 17 ff. Massinger, etc. These dramatists (Shakespeare's 
immediate predecessors, his contemporaries, and his immediate 
successors) wrote what Macaulay calls ''that very part of our 
literature with which it is especially desirable that an editor of 
Shakespeare should be conversant." What help might Johnson 
have derived from their plays? 

31, 27. Royal Academy. The Royal Academy of Arts was 
formed in 1768. Johnson, Boswell, and Goldsmith held ap- 
pointments in connection with it. Boswell (see the index ip 



96 



Notes and Comment 



Hill's edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson, under "Royal 
Academy") has many anecdotes of Johnson's speech and conduct 
at its dinners. 

33, 5-6. The service of the trunk-maker and the pastry- 
cook: that is, to be used for linings and for wrapping- 
paper. 

33, 9 ff. Goldsmith, Reynolds, Burke. These men are far 
too important to be dismissed in a brief note. Let one or more 
pupils take each name, collect and arrange the passages in Bos- 
well's Life of Johnson which illustrate his character and his 
relations with Johnson, and then report to the class. 

33, 12. Jones: Sir William Jones (1746-1794) was one of 
the very few scholars of his time who chose to exercise his pow- 
ers in the field of Oriental language. 

33> 29-30. To this day. Macaulay was made a member in 

1839. 

34, I. Boswell. See Introduction, pages xxxi-xxxiii. 

34, 15. Wilkes. Some of the political utterances of John i 
Wilkes (1728-1797), editor of the North Briton, were so bold 
that he was not merely expelled from Parliament but was , 
actually imprisoned. The Bill of Rights Society was an asso- j 
ciation of the followers of Wilkes. 1 

34, 17. Whitefield: George Whitefield (pronounced as if ! 
spelled Whitfield) was the great open-air preacher of the | 
Methodists. Read what Benjamin Franklin says in his Auto- | 
biography about Whitefield's preaching. ! 

34, 26. Such questions as. For the particular question and I 
the amusing dialogue which ensued, see Boswell's Life of John- \ 
son, II, loo-ioi. 

34, 28. Johnson ... a water-drinker. This is hardly true, j 
Johnson himself said in 1778: "Early in life I drank wine; for 
many years I drank none. I then for some years drank a great 
deal. I then had a severe illness, and left it off, and I have | 
never begun it again." In 1776 he said that he believed he had I 
"drunk too little, and therefore have the gout;" in 1782 he told , 
Hannah More that his reason for not taking wine was that he , 
could not otherwise avoid excess. See Hill's very full note in his \ 
edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson, I, 103 ff. [ 

36, 8-9. Southwark: a district of London which lies south 
of the Thames. Streatham Common is ^^ f^w miles further f 
south. 



Notes and Comment 97 

36, 27. Buck, Maccaroni: cant terms (like "dude") for 
men of fashion. 

37, 26-27. Mitre Tavern. '' The Mitre Tavern still stands in 
Fleet Street: but where now is its Scot-and-lot paying, beef-and- 
ale loving, cock-hatted, potbellied Landlord; its rosy-faced, 
assiduous Landlady, with all her shining brass-pans, waxed 
tables, well-filled larder-shelves; her cooks, and bootjacks, and 
errand-boys, and watery-mouthed hangers-on? Gone! Gone! 
The becking waiter, that with wreathed smiles was wont to 
spread for Samuel and Bozzy their ' supper of the gods,' has long 
since pocketed his last sixpence; and vanished, sixpences and 
all, like a ghost at cockcrowing.'' — Carlyle's Re%.ie^ of Bos- 
vjelVs Johnson. 

37» 30-3I' Bookseller . . . patron. Their names appear, 
by an arrangement of the sentence rather characteristic of 
Macaulay, a few lines further on. 

38, 4-5. An important event. Boswell should by all means 
be read for a detailed account of the matters which Macaulay 
sums up so rapidly in this paragraph. 

38, 5. Hebrides: a group of islands off the west coast of 
Scotland. They are sometimes called the Western Islands. 
Johnson's book about his travels there was entitled A Journey 
to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775). 

39, 22. Macpherson. The case of James Macpherson (1736- 
1796) is less simple, apparently, than Johnson and Macaulay 
supposed. His ''Epics" {Fingal, 1762, and Temora, 1763), al- 
though they show no great knowledge or sense of editorial 
responsibility, do probably contain some genuinely popular ver- 
sions of Gaelic material which, though quite clearly more mod- 
ern than the date (a.d. 250) assigned by Macpherson, is still 
very old. 

39, 25-26. Johnson reiterated the charge of forgery: in the 
following letter: 

Mr. James Macpherson : 

I received your foolish and impudent letter. Any violence offered 
me I shall do my best to repel ; and what I cannot do for myself, the law 
shall do for me. I hope I shall never be deterred from detecting what 
I think a cheat, by the menaces of a ruffian. 

What would you have me retract? I thought your book an impos- 
ture ; I think it an imposture still. For this opinion I have given my 
reasons to the public, which I here dare you to refute. Your rage I 
defy. Your abilities, since j'our Homer, are not so formidable, and 



98 



Notes and Comment 



what I hear of your morals, inclines me to pay regard not to what you 
say, but to what you shall prove. You may print this if you will. 

Sam. Johnson. 

40, 12. Kenricks, Campbells, MacNicols, and Hendersons. 
Kenrick attacked Johnson's Shakespeare, Campbell attacked his 
style, MacNicol and Henderson attacked his Journey to the 
Western Islands. All are forgotten. 

40, 19. Maxime, etc. I am most eager for a contest with 
you, if you are willing. 

40, 31. That fine apothegm of Bentley: ** It is a maxim 
with me that no man was ever written out of reputation but by 
himself." (Bishop Monk's Life of Bentley, p. 90.) Trevelyan 
(Life of Macaulay, II, 211) tells us that Macaulay dearly loved 
to quote this maxim both in print and in conversation. He 
quotes it, as "justly and nobly" said, in the sixth paragraph of 
his life of Francis Atterbury, which appeared in the eighth edi- 
tion of the Encyclopedia Britannica along with the present essa}^. 

41, 15. Almon and Stockdale: booksellers and publishers. 
The former, particularly, dealt largely in political books and 
pamphlets. 

41, 15-16. Taxation no Tyranny: Taxation no Tyranny; an 
Answer to the Resolutions and Address of the American Con- 
gress (1775). Boswell had an unfavorable opinion of this 
pamphlet, in which, he says {Life of Johnson, II, 313), were 
united " positive assertion, sarcastical severity, and extravagant 
ridicule." 

42, 10. Wilson: Richard Wilson (1714-1782). "Wilson is 
now acknowledged to be one of the greatest of English land- 
scape-painters. His art . . . was somewhat formal and care- 
less in detail, but in grandeur of design, in breadth of treat- 
ment, in the harmony of its rich but quiet color, and in thai 
ren(iering of space and air, Wilson has few rivals." (Dic- 
tionary of National Biography.) 

42, 18. Cowley: Abraham Cowley, a contemporary of Milton. 1 
His poetry, much admired by contemporaries, was still esteemed; 
when Johnson wrote his Lives of the Poets, in which the life of! 
Cowley is one of the best. 

42, 23. Restoration. Of whom? When? For what reasons? 
What change did the Restoration make in Parliament? In the! 
Church? 



Notes and Comment 99 

42, 28. Walmesley. Johnson's grateful tribute to him, which 
also contains a famous saying about David Garrick, deserves 
to be remembered. It appears in Johnson's sketch of Edmund 
Smith, in his Lives of the English Poets: 

" Of Gilbert Walmesley, thus presented to my mind, let me 
indulge myself in the remembrance. I knew him very early; 
he was one of the first friends that literature procured me, and 
I hope that, at least, my gratitude made me worthy of his 
notice. 

" He was of an advanced age, and I was only not a boy, 
yet he never received my notions with contempt. He was a 
Whig, with all the virulence and malevolence of his party; yet 
differences of opinion did not keep us apart. I honored him and 
he endured me. 

" He had mingled with the gay world without exemption 
from its vices or its follies; but he never neglected the cultiva- 
tion of his mind. His belief of revelation was unshaken; his 
learning preserved his principles; he grew first regular, and 
then pious. 

" His studies had been so various, that I am not able to name 
a man of equal knowledge. His acquaintance with books was 
great, and what he did not immediately know, he could, at 
least, tell where to find. Such was his amplitude of learning, 
and such his copiousness of communication, that it may be 
doubted whether a day now passes, in which I have not some 
advantage from his friendship. 

" At this man's table I enjoyed many cheerful and instructive 
hours, with companions such as are not often found — with one 
who has lengthened, and one who has gladdened life; with 
Dr. James, whose skill in physic will be long remembered; and 
with David Garrick, whom I hoped to have gratified with this 
character of our common friend. But what are the hopes of 
man ! I am disappointed by that stroke of death, which has 
eclipsed the gaiety of nations, and impoverished the public stock 
of harmless pleasure." Compare 5: 32. 

42, 29. Gibber: Colley Gibber (1671-1757). He made over 
plays by Shakespeare, Dryden, and other dramatists, both 
French and English. 

42, 30. Orrery. John Boyle (i 707-1 762), fifth Earl of Orrery, 
published in 1751 his Remarks on the Life and Writings of Jona- 
than Sidft. Johnson thought that Orrery '* tried to pass for a 



lOO Notes and Comment 

better talker, a better writer, and a better thinker than he was." 
(Boswell's Life of Johnson, V, 238.) 

42, 32. Services: information derogatory to various persons 
menioned in Pope's Dunciad. 

43, 12. When grossly and provokingly unjust: as in the 
life of Gray, and in parts of the Milton. 

44, 6. Malone. He edited Boswell's Life of Johnson. Some 
of his notes therein are valuable. 

44, 20. Robertson: William Robertson (1721-1793), a Scot* 
tish historian. Of his works the History of the Emperor Charles 
V (1769) is usually considered the best. 

44, 34. Regretted. What meaning has this word in this 
passage? 

45, 18. Soon. It was three years after her husband's death 
that Mrs. Thrale married Piozzi. 

45, 18. A music-master from Brescia. The remainder of 
this paragraph is so distorted by prejudice as to be almost with- 
out value. 

45> 33-34- In a solemn and tender prayer. See page 71 
of this volume. 

46, 16. The Ephesian matron. In the midst of her violent 
grief for her husband, the Ephesian matron fell in love with 
a soldier and married him the same day. The story is briefly 
summarized in the second chapter of John Dunlop's History 
of Fiction. 

46, 16-17. The two pictures. See Hamlet, III, iv. 

48, 20. Anfractuosities. Johnson does not include this word 
in his Dictionary. He does, however, define " anf ractuousness " 
as " fulness of windings and turnings." 

51, 3-4. The proprietor of the World: Edward Moore 
(1712-1757), of whom there is a brief but good sketch in the 
Dictionary of National Biography. 

51, 4. Two papers: numbers 100 and loi. See the note on 
page 24, line 2. 

51, 12-13. Le vainqueur du vainqueur de la terre: adapted 
from Boileau's line, " Je chante le vainqueur des vainqueurs de 
la terre." (VArt Poetique, iii, 272.) Johnson's version ("the 
conqueror of the conqueror of the land") is, of course, not a 
misquotation, but a necessary change. 

52, 3. The shepherd in Virgil: Eclogues, viii, 43 ff. 



Notes and Comment loi 

54, 17. Parva, etc. ''Small matters did they not occur daily." 
(Pliny, Letters, iii, 3.) 

61 (Motto). Respicere, etc.: Juvenal, Satires, x, 275. The 
context is 

Festino ad nostros, et regem transeo Ponti, 
Et Croesum, quem vox justi facunda Solonis 
Respicere ad longae jussit spatia ultima vitae: 

" I hasten to ours, and pass by the King of Pontus, and Croesus, 
whom the persuasive voice of the just Solon directed to con- 
template the last chapters of a long life." 

66, 20 if. (Summary.) It will be understood that this sum- 
mary is supplied by the editor to bridge the gap between the first 
chapter of Rasselas and the tenth. 



QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION 

(The numbers refer to paragraphs) 

I. What did Samuel Johnson inherit from his father? Do 
you see any possible connection between Johnson's early read- 
ing and his father's occupation? What are the advantages of 
reading what is interesting and passing over what is dull? 
What are the disadvantages? 

2,3,4. Try to find out all that you can about Oxford. In 
what ways does it seem to you diiferent from an American col- 
lege? 

5. Do you imagine that Johnson's peculiarities of manner were 
as extraordinary as Macaulay represents them? How should 
you go about to test this matter for yourself? Try to find out 
what accounts of Johnson have come down to us from those who 
knew him. 

9, 10. Do you think that London played a larger part In the 
literary history of Johnson's time than a great city does now? 
Why? Would the effect of patronage be to make possible the 
very best sort of literature? 

13. What is the difference between a Whig and a Tory? 
Which was Addison? Swift? Defoe? How do their political 
feelings appear in their writings? Which writings are likely 
to last longer, — those in which political feeling is bitter or those 
in which it can hardly be seen? Give examples. 

14, 15. Find as many cases as you can in which authors of 
Johnson's time made use of the classics. Why is the eighteenth 
century called the "age of classicism"? Who were the men 
whose favor a young author anxious to succeed in the London 
of Johnson's time would most wish to gain? 

16. In what respect were Johnson's character and literary 
attainments superior to those of his companions? 

22. Try to write out an imaginary conversation between John- 
son and Garrick upon some subject which will bring out the 
traits of character In each which Macaulay mentions. 

23-25. Do you think you could, without being told, distinguish 
a number of the Spectator from a number of the Rambler? 
Try to write a pair of essays, — one in the manner of Addison, 

102 



Questions and Topics for Discussion 103 

the other in the manner of Johnson. Try to find passages in 
Johnson's writings which reveal the qualities mentioned by 
Macaulay (page i8, lines 26-32). Do the Rambler papers 
mentioned by Macaulay represent Johnson at his best? 

27. Is it to be regretted that Chesterfield did not become John- 
son's patron ? What makes Johnson's letter to Chesterfield so 
fine? Why is it so easy to read aloud? Try changing about 
some of the phrases: is the effect changed? In what way? 

28. What constitutes a good dictionary? Are there any evi- 
dences of personality in modern dictionaries? What qualifica- 
tions had Johnson for making a good dictionary? What dis- 
qualifications? Try for practice to make, without consulting a 
dictionary, good definitions of a few familiar words; for ex- 
ample, " home," " identity," " gate," " lamp," '' pencil,'^ " flower," 
" book," " various." What difficulties did you find in doing 
this? What, as a result of your efforts, do you think are the 
essentials of a good definition? Compare your own definitions 
of the words given above with those in the dictionary. What is 
there in the preface of a modern dictionary? What is there at 
the end? 

30. Is the Idler a. good title for Johnson's periodical ? What 
did Johnson think about idleness? Was he inclined to be idle 
himself? Why? 

33. Why is Rasselas not read nowadays? What novels writ- 
ten before 1800 are most famous? Do fashions in novels change 
more or less rapidly than fashions in essays? Why? 

34. Do you think that Johnson was right in accepting the 
pension? What does "three hundred a year" mean? Does 
it mean three hundred dollars? Learn the names and values 
of the principal English coins (penny, shilling, crown, etc.). 
How much is a pound? Are pensions given in England now- 
adays ? 

36. Is there anything in this paragraph which bears upon the 
first two questions on paragraph 30? 

37. In what estimation was Shakespeare held in the eight- 
eenth century? What other important eighteenth-century au- 
thors edited Shakespeare? Who, in addition to Shakespeare, 
were the great Elizabethan dramatists? What impression of the 
Elizabethan period do you get from reading Scott's Kenilivorth? 
Mention some of the ways in which you think the Elizabethan 
age differed from the time of Johnson. 



104 Questions and Topics for Discussion 

38. Find out more about the principal members of the Club. 
Select one who interests you, look up all the passages about him 
in Boswell's Life of Johnson, and then try to piece them together 
into a character sketch. 

39. Do you think that much skill is involved in writing a 
book like BoswelPs Life of Johnson? Did Boswell, do you 
suppose, w^rite down e^'erything that Johnson said ? If not, w^hat 
did he select? Are Boswell's descriptions of by-play good? 
Find some passage to illustrate your answer. What did Carlyle 
think about " hero-worship " ? How does this apply to Bos- 
w^ell's feeling for Johnson? 

40. What can you say about Johnson's relations with the 
Thrales? About Johnson's household? 

41. What can you say about Johnson's travels? What quali- 
ties of mind constitute an intelligent traveler? For what rea- 
sons w^as traveling in the eighteenth century more difficult and 
dangerous than it is now? Do you know of any other eighteenth- 
century men of letters who traveled at all extensively? Did 
their writings show that they had traveled? Why did John- 
son dislike the Scotch? Find as many passages as you can in 
Boswell which show Johnson's opinions about Scotland and 
the Scotch. Did he mean to have all these remarks taken 
seriously — except by Boswell ? 

43-44. In what ways did Johnson show that he was a strong 
Tory? 

45-48. Why does Macaulay call the Lives of the Poets John- 
son's best work? What do you think a similar series of 
Lives of the Poets by Macaulay would have been like? In what 
respects might it have been superior to Johnson's? In what 
respects would it probably have been inferior? Try to find out 
enough about Gray to see what there was about his poetry 
that Johnson would not be likely to care for. 

50. Do you think Macaulay's account of Mrs. Thrale's sec- 
ond marriage shows prejudice? In what expressions? Do you 
think that it shows anything in respect to Johnson's influence 
over his friends? 



Make an outline of the entire essay. 

Are there any important parts of Johnson's life which Macau- 
lay passes over too briefly? Are there any to which he gives 
a needless amount of space? 



Questions and Topics for Discussion 105 

Are Macaulay's transitions easy? Give five or six examples. 
Can you, by analyzing them, see how he does it? If you can, 
try to write a composition of two paragraphs, paying special 
attention to the transition from the first paragraph to the second. 

Read through a number of the paragraphs of this essay, draw- 
ing a line under the topic-sentence of each paragraph. Is there 
any particular part of the paragraph where Macaulay tends 
to place the topic sentence? Is this effective? Why? 

Has Macaulay a large vocabulary? Does he use simple 
words? Make a list of fifty words in this essay which you 
yourself do not often use. Look up the meaning of those you 
do not know. Select a few of them each week (say five), and 
try to introduce them into your writing and your conversation. 

Do you think that Johnson, if he could have chosen a 
biographer, would have selected Macaulay? Give your reasons. 

What do you think are the best points about Macaulay's life 
of Johnson? 






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